Humpback Whale Song Has Striking Similarities to Human Language: Study

New research has found that the structure of humpback whale song is similar to human language — both use shorter sounds more frequently than those that are more complex, reported The Guardian.

The structure helps infants of both species learn to communicate from their elders more quickly.

“Language has long been considered a uniquely human trait, with features that mark it out as distinct from the communication of all other species,” a press release from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem said. “However, research published today in Science has uncovered the same statistical structure that is a hallmark of human language in humpback whale song. Humpback whale song is a striking example of a complex, culturally transmitted behavior, but up to now, there was little evidence it has language-like structure.”

A thread explaining our new discovery about humpback whale song published today in Science… We found key statistical properties that characterise all human languages in another species for the first time. We have more in common with whales than we previously thought! doi.org/10.1126/scie…

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— Simon Kirby (@simonkirby.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 6:48 AM

All known human languages follow the same pattern — known as Zipf’s law — wherein the most frequently occuring word is twice as prevalent as the second most, recurs three times as often as the third, and on and on, the researchers wrote in The Conversation.

Scientists have searched for evidence of the same pattern in the commutation of other species, but had not found it until now.

When infants learn, they need to learn to understand where words begin and end, as speech is continuous, without gaps between words. Three decades of statistical learning  has shown that babies figure this out by listening for sounds with a surprising context, such as those between words.

The study, “Whale song shows language-like statistical structure,” was led by Dr. Inbal Arnon, a psychology professor at Hebrew University; Dr. Ellen Garland, a principal research fellow in the School of Biology at University of St. Andrews; and Professor Simon Kirby, a British cognitive scientist who currently holds the Chair of Language Evolution at The University of Edinburgh.

“Using insights and methods from how babies learn language allowed us to discover previously undetected structure in whale song,” Arnon said in the press release. “This work shows how learning and cultural transmission can shape the structure of communication systems: we may find similar statistical structure wherever complex sequential behaviour is transmitted culturally.”

“It raises the intriguing possibility that humpback whales, like human babies, may learn their song by tracking transitional probabilities between sound elements, and using dips in those probabilities as a cue to segment the song,” Arnon said.

In the study, the research team’s analysis of whale song data used the same method.

“Unexpectedly, using this technique revealed in whale song the same statistical properties that are found in all languages. It turns out both human language and whale song have statistically coherent parts,” the researchers wrote in The Conversation. “In other words, they both contain recurring parts where the transitions between elements are more predictable within the part. Moreover, these recurring sub-sequences we detected follow the Zipfian frequency distribution found across all human languages, and not found before in other species.”

These recurring language properties illustrate the “deep commonality” between whales and humans, two unrelated species united by their culturally transmitted communication systems.

The findings demonstrate the important parts learning and transmission play in the structure of such systems. They reveal that the foundational characteristics of human language could be found across evolutionary distant species.

“Revealing this hidden language-like structure in whale song was unexpected, but it strongly suggests this cultural behaviour holds crucial insight into the evolution of complex communication across the animal kingdom,” Garland said in the press release. “Whale song is not a language; it lacks semantic meaning. It may be more reminiscent of human music, which also has this statistical structure, but lacks the expressive meaning found in language.”

“Whether the units we detected using the infant-inspired method are salient to the whales themselves remains an open question,” Garland added.

Kirby said the findings suggest that it can be useful to look not just to our closest primate relatives to understand the evolution of language, but to also examine examples of “convergent evolution elsewhere in nature.”

“Looking beyond the way language is used to express meaning, we should consider how language is learned and transmitted culturally over multiple generations,” Kirby said in the press release. “These findings challenge long held assumptions about the uniqueness of human language, uncovering deep commonalities between evolutionarily distant species.”

Proud supervisor moment! Ella's masters thesis paper on Okinawa humpback #whale #song complexity and evolution is out today in RSOS. Awesome collaboration with Nozomi Kobayashi et al. @francae.bsky.social @lrendell.bsky.social @seamammalresearch.bsky.social doi.org/10.1098/rsos…

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— Ellen Garland (@ellengarland.bsky.social) February 11, 2025 at 9:33 PM