By GREGORY ZELLER //
Whales serenading alien probes to save the Earth from total destruction makes for great science fiction – but there’s more science fact in there than you might have thought.
That’s the word – literally – from a new study in Science Advances, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s open-access multidisciplinary journal, claiming that different whale species not only “speak,” but exhibit some of the same linguistic principles as the complex patterns shaping human speech.
Published in February, the solo study by Stony Brook University postdoctoral fellow Mason Youngblood, a standout of SBU’s Institute for Advanced Computational Science, compares vocal sequences collected from 16 whale species to the structures of 51 human languages – and reaches some remarkable conclusions.
According to Youngblood, 11 whale species exhibit evidence of Menzerath’s law – a linguistic rule-of-thumb that states the larger the size of a linguistic construct, the smaller the size of its constituents.
Mason Youngblood: Speech! Speech!
In a nutshell: The longer a sentence (based on number of clauses), the shorter the clauses (based on number of words), and the longer a word (based on number of syllables or morphs), the shorter the syllables or morphs. (For those keeping score, a “morph” is a word segment representing the smallest unit of sound – “infamous” includes the morphs “in,” “fam” and “us.”)
Whales’ tendency to “compress” their calls doesn’t stop there. Youngblood notes that several species – including humpbacks and blue whales (until the kaiju emerge, still the largest creature on Earth) – also follow Zipf’s law of abbreviation, which states that the most frequently used sounds tend to be the shortest and a language’s most common words appear in speech on a measurable descending scale. (The most-common word occurs twice as much as the second-most common word, three times as much as the third-most common, and so on.)
So, now that you’re a linguistics expert, translating whale song into English should be a snap, yes?
Not so fast – as with humans speaking different dialects of the same language, results may vary.
Take orca, a.k.a. the killer whale. This magnificent creature is easily recognizable by its black-and-white body, though its linguistic patterns are anything but: For whatever reason, orcas compress their call sequences (fins up on Menzerath) but not the smaller elements inside them (down with Zipf).
And then there are dolphins (and yes, dolphins are whales – or, more accurately, all whales, dolphins and porpoises are members of the aquatic-mammal infraorder Cetacea).
Click, whistle, click, click: You have no idea what I’m saying, do you?
Although they do occasionally break into song, there’s no scientific evidence of a dolphin language. And while dolphins are known to use a wide range of sounds and nonverbal gestures to communicate, there are no traces of the linguistic-efficiency patterns common to other whale species, according to Youngblood’s comprehensive research.
These findings suggest that the tendency toward efficient communication is not universal, but shaped by a mix of biology, behavior and environment.
They also suggest that humans have a long way to go before we can learn to speak whale – though Youngblood still finds it “fascinating that communication evolves in similar ways across species, even when the purpose is wildly different.”
“Humpback and bowhead whales are thought to sing to attract mates, dolphins and killer whales use calls to coordinate with one another, and sperm whales produce clicks to communicate clan identity,” the scientist said. “Yet, despite these differences, many of their vocal sequences show the same efficiency patterns found in human language.
“[This suggests] that the drive to communicate with less effort is widespread in animals.”
