Image courtesy of Tony Wu/Nature Picture Library/Alamy
“Humpbackwhale songs have statistical patterns in their structure that are remarkably
similar to those seen in human language. While this doesn’t mean the songs
convey complex meanings like our sentences do, it hints that whales may learn
their songs in a similar way to how human infants start to understand language.
Only male humpback
whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) sing, and the behaviour is thought to be
important for attracting mates. The songs are constantly evolving, with new
elements appearing and spreading through the population until the old song is
completely replaced with a new one.
“We think it’s a
little bit like a standardised test, where everybody’s got to do the same task
but you can make changes and embellishments to show that you’re better at the
task than everybody else,” says Jenny Allen at Griffith University in
Gold Coast, Australia.
Instead of trying
to find meaning in the songs, Allen and her colleagues were looking for innate structural patterns that may be similar to those seen
in human language. They analysed eight years of whale songs recorded around New
Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean.”
But humpback whales are not deriving a proto language that people could use. They are animals with created ways to tell their message.
Source:
James Woodford 2025 Humpback whale songs have patterns that resemble human language | New Scientist 6 February
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