Turns out, whales might have more in common with us than we thought—at least when it comes to how they “talk.” A recent study found that the hauntingly beautiful songs of whales follow the same speech patterns as human language. Yes, really. 🤯
Researchers analyzed eight years of whale song data, breaking down their grunts, shrieks, and moans into frequency patterns. And guess what? The whales seemed to follow Zipf’s Law—a linguistic principle that governs how we humans use words. Basically, the most common sounds whales make occur twice as often as the second most common, three times as often as the third, and so on. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the English language does the exact same thing with words like “the” and “of.”
“We were all dumbfounded,” admitted study co-author Ellen Garland in an interview with Scientific American. “Did we think we would find this? Hell no.”
But why does this happen? Scientists believe that both humans and whales might structure their “language” this way to help babies (and calves) learn faster. That means our modes of communication might not be as unique as we thought—and whales could be much closer to speaking our language than we ever imagined. 🤯🐋
