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Sperm Whales' Communication Closely Parallels Human Language, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 49

Posted by BeauHD from the so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-phonemes dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales – enormous, ocean-dwelling animals that last shared a common ancestor with humans more than 90 million years ago. But the whales' vocalized communications are remarkably similar to our own, researchers have discovered. Not only do sperm whale have a form of "alphabet" and form vowels within their vocalizations but the structure of these vowels behaves in the same way as human speech, the new study has found.

Sperm whales communicate in a series of short clicks called codas. Analysis of these clicks shows that the whales can differentiate vowels through the short or elongated clicks or through rising or falling tones, using patterns similar to languages such as Mandarin, Latin and Slovenian. The structure of the whales' communication has "close parallels in the phonetics and phonology of human languages, suggesting independent evolution," the paper, published in the Proceedings B journal, states. Sperm whale coda vocalizations are "highly complex and represent one of the closest parallels to human phonology of any analyzed animal communication system," it added.

[...] The new study shows that "sperm whale communication isn't just about patterns of clicks -- it involves multiple interacting layers of structure," said Mauricio Cantor, a behavioral ecologist at the Marine Mammal Institute who was not involved in the research. "With this study, we're starting to see that these signals are organized in ways we didn't fully appreciate before." The latest discovery around sperm whale speech has inched forward the possibility of someday fully understanding the creatures and even communicating with them. Project CETI has set a goal of being able to comprehend 20 different vocalized expressions, relating to actions such as diving and sleeping, within the next five years. A future where we're able to fully understand what the whales are saying and be able to have a conversation with them is "totally within our grasp," said David Gruber, founder and president of Project CETI. "We've already got a lot further than I thought we could. But it will take time, and funding. At the moment we are like a two-year-old, just saying a few words. In a few years' time, maybe we will be more like a five-year-old."

Sperm Whales' Communication Closely Parallels Human Language, Study Finds More | Reply

Sperm Whales' Communication Closely Parallels Human Language, Study Finds

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  • Let me guess (Score:5, Funny)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Friday April 17, 2026 @12:02AM (#66098014)

    These whales were named by the same guy who called the 7th planet "Uranus"?

    • Re: Let me guess (Score:3, Insightful)

      by T34L ( 10503334 )

      Almost as bad. They were named by some guy cutting them open, finding this white homogenous greasy mass who then went "oh this whale is so damn full of cum. It's a cum whale."

      And then we proceeded to almost exterminate them in hunt for that stuff because it worked great as lamp oil. The stuff that we confused for cum.

      Lets make a living hunting some cum whales for their cum, the whalers would effectively say.

      And people think navy being gay is a modern impression.

    • I think it is only Americans who intentionally or unintentionally are unable to pronounce Uranus correctly.

      Took me actually a while to get the stupid meme behind it ...

  • ... What are they talking about? "Gladis, look out, there's a Japanese whaling ship heading in your direction!" "Where's a transparent aluminum tank in a Klingon warbird when you need one!?"

    • ... What are they talking about? "Gladis, look out, there's a Japanese whaling ship heading in your direction!" "Where's a transparent aluminum tank in a Klingon warbird when you need one!?"

      Then they lament, "Those frelling Humpback whales probably got it."

  • Direct link to the research article (Score:5, Informative)

    by Elendil ( 11919 ) on Friday April 17, 2026 @12:44AM (#66098028)

    The Guardian could have used a link to the original research article instead of the Proceedings B journal, and save everybody some time?

    Here it is for your convenience https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.2994

  • I wonder... (Score:3)

    by joshuark ( 6549270 ) on Friday April 17, 2026 @01:12AM (#66098038)

    I wonder...how the sperm whale might say the human equivalent of:

    "Not tonight, I've got a headache."

    or

    "No thanks, I'm washing my hair."

    and so on...perhaps some unique sound pattern. Perhaps Sea Quest was prescient (https://seaquest-dsv.fandom.com/wiki/Darwin) about Darwin. Soon humanity will have a whale of a time, or moby dick.

    --JoshK.

  • Heeeeeeeellllloooooooooo.

  • Took us long enough. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TriangularSoup ( 8088906 ) on Friday April 17, 2026 @01:43AM (#66098062)
    I've been waiting for the languages of dolphins and whales to be decoded since I was probably 10 years old. This should be given as much funding as any search for extra-terrestrial signals, because the end result is the same - we will not be alone in the universe anymore. we will have another culture, with completely different origins and values, with which to interact, and from which to learn. At the risk of sounding a little too much like Kevin Flynn, philosophy and psychology and religion really can all be turned on their heads at the same time, in a single, massive breakthrough and the flurry of new kinds of research that will follow. Is this not obvious? The way goverments have seemingly guarded their funds from the remote possibility of disappointment upsets me.
  • This is just such a arbitrary pick of languages for a common feature i just knew that the news article was badly written. The original article explains those are different features across the languages and is actually super interesting https://royalsocietypublishing... [royalsocie...ishing.org]
    • It still seems like a stretch to call those sounds vowels. They're clicks, and clicks are consonants in any human language that uses them. The anti-journalists at The Guardian probably picked those languages because they have a few words without vowels.

      • This is the Grauniad. They probably don't even know what vowels are.

        • I had to look that up. I was not shocked to find out that their editorial staff has that long of a reputation for incompetence.
    • Any feature that can be produced by the vocal cords will eventually be used for language. So it's not really surprising that there are parallels in whale talk.
  • This is weird, but I have always privately speculated that since the communications center of cetaceans brain is so large, they might actually be holding several conversations at once in different frequency bands.
  • All those radio telescopes and others looking for intelligent life somewhere in space hoping to find Vulcans.

    If we looked inwards and poured all those trillions over the years to search for life in the galaxy (as an aside not a primary use case) if we diverted a fraction we'd have found the "alien" life forms on Earth a long time ago.

    Bet we'd have had some very enlightening conversations by now... Of course being a tree hugging fish talking hippie makes the kids gay and jesus hates that so *shrugs*

  • Glorified pattern matching should be able to crack all languages.

  • Not interesting yet. (Score:5, Informative)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <(imipak) (at) (yahoo.com)> on Friday April 17, 2026 @08:42AM (#66098374) Homepage Journal

    It's possible that cetaceans have a true language. They certainly have something that seems to function the same as a "hello, I am (name)", where the name part differs between all cetaceans but the surrounding clicks are identical. The response clicks also include that same phrase which researchers think serves the purpose of a name.

    But we've done structural analysis to death and, yes, all the results are interesting (it seems to have high information content, in the Shannon sense, seems to have some sort of structure, and seems to have intriguing early-language features), but so does the Voynich Manuscript and there's a 99.9% chance that the Voynich Manuscript is a fraud with absolutely no meaning whatsoever. Structure only tells you if something is worth a closer look and we have known for a long time that cetacean clicks were worth a closer look. Further structural work won't tell us anything we don't already know.

    What we need is to have a long-term recording of activities and clicks/whistles, where the sounds are recorded from many different directions (because they can be highly directional) and where the recording positively identifies the source of each sound, what that source was doing at the time (plus what they'd been doing immediately prior and what they do next), along with what they're focused on and where the sounds were directed (if they were). This sort of analysis is where any new information can be found.

    But we also need to look at lessons learned in primate research, linguistics, sociology and anthropology, to understand what ISN'T going to work, in terms of approaches. In all three cases, we've learned that you learn best immersively, not from a distance. If an approach has failed in EVERY OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCE, then assuming it is going to work in cetacean research is stupid. It might be the correct way to go, but assuming it is is the bit that is stupid. If things fail repeatedly, regardless of where they are applied, then there's a decent chance it is necessary to ask that maybe the stuff that keeps failing is defective.

  • So we get ever closer.. (Score:3)

    by smithmc ( 451373 ) on Friday April 17, 2026 @09:20AM (#66098434) Journal
    ...to finding out whether they really are saying "So long and thanks for all the fish!"...?

  • I wonder how communication in animals works. Is it innate or acquired? For us humans, although the foundation of language ability might be innate, the actual language is acquired, which is why we have so many mutually unintelligible languages. It would be interesting to study groups of whales that don't have physical interaction to see if the language is divergent. Even if whales could hear each other, wouldn't physical sight (or some other sense) be needed to learn what different sounds correlate with?

    • Different groups of whales of the same species have different languages. That is long known.
      Most prominently for Orcas.

      Similar to crows, they share a core vocabulary over a wider area, but groups and families have their own local dialect.

  • But they are not the hell your whales.

  • Petunias in particular

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