Humpback Whales Sing the Way Humans Speak

The animals’ complex songs share structural patterns with human language that may make them easier for whales to learn, a new study suggests.

The English language is full of wonderful words, from “anemone” and “aurora” to “zenith” and “zodiac.”

But these are special occasion words, sprinkled sparingly into writing and conversation. The words in heaviest rotation are short and mundane. And they follow a remarkable statistical rule, which is universal across human languages: The most common word, which in English is “the,” is used about twice as frequently as the second most common word (“of,” in English), three times as frequently as the third most common word (“and”), continuing in that pattern.

Now, an international, interdisciplinary team of scientists has found that the intricate songs of humpback whales, which can spread rapidly from one population to another, follow the same rule, which is known as Zipf’s law.

The scientists are careful to note that whale song is not equivalent to human language. But the findings, they argue, suggest that forms of vocal communication that are complex and culturally transmitted may have shared structural properties.

“We expect them to evolve to be easy to learn,” said Simon Kirby, an expert on language evolution at the University of Edinburgh and an author of the new study. The results were published on Thursday in the journal Science.

“We think of language as this culturally evolving system that has to essentially be passed on by its hosts, which are humans,” Dr. Kirby added. “What’s so gratifying for me is to see that same logic seems to also potentially apply to whale song.”