The fictional world is full of people who can talk to animals: Tarzan of the Apes, Mowgli from The Jungle Book, and Dr. Doolittle. But what if we really could learn to converse with apes, wolves, and other wild creatures? It turns out that scientists studying a range of types of animal communication may be bringing us closer to understanding, and maybe even using, animal language.
Human vs. Animal Language: Worlds Apart?
Linguists specializing in the scientific study of human language have long maintained that human language and animal communication are fundamentally different from one another: Animals can convey simple messages about things in their immediately present environment, while humans have the ability to combine language sounds, parts of speech, and phrase types into infinitely many sentences with limitless meaning possibilities.
And while we humans have to learn our complex language systems from those who raise us, animal communication has been thought to be largely instinctual: A mother cat doesn’t have to teach her kittens how to meow and purr, and the big cats in the jungle make basically the same sounds, with similar meanings, just at a louder—and scarier—volume.
Hidden Parallels in Whale Language
However, new research on whale communication has uncovered some surprising similarities between human language and animal communication. Driving this research is Project CETI, the Cetacean Translation Initiative, a non-profit organization applying a range of scientific perspectives, including linguistics, AI, cryptography, and marine biology, to the study of sperm whale communication. The group recently published findings showing that these communications bear many of the same hallmarks of complex linguistic systems as human tongues.
In particular, they found that the clicking sounds made by Eastern Caribbean sperm whales show regular rhythmic patterns and that overlaid on top of these clicks were regular patterns of frequency or pitch.
This is exactly how human language works: We make sounds by making pulses of sound with our vocal cords (technically called vocal folds) and then shape the airstream by configuring our mouths to produce different bands of frequencies—vowels. (Consonants have to do with air stoppage of different types.) In other words, it seems that both humans and sperm whales have regular cadences of “speech,” and that we both have vowels we use in patterned ways.
Listening to Whale Vowels
Prior to these findings, researchers had thought that perhaps the whales were using clicks as a sort of Morse code, a complex enough communication system, but now they know that whale talk is more multi-dimensional.
In fact, if the click sequences are sped up, they resolve into harmonies resembling human vowels. It’s possible that, for whales, it’s these vowel-like sounds that are meaningful, not really the clicks per se. In other words, we’re hearing clicks, but the whales are hearing—and talking in—vowels. They’re just talking more slowly than we do.
Uncovering Bird Grammar
As research has revealed that whale communication is made up of discrete, patterned sounds, just like human language, scientists studying bird communications have found other parallels to human speech, this time in the area of grammar.
Research on Japanese tit birds shows that these birds have various meaningful calls, almost like different words. Some are noun-like, for example, calls indicating dangers like “snake” or “hawk.” Others are like verbs, for example, calls for “alert” and “gather.” These calls can be combined, just like we can combine words and phrases into different sentences: “alert snake” is one sentence; “alert gather” is another.
An even more striking finding is that, just like human sentences, the words (calls) can only go in a certain order.
One researcher who has been studying bird communication for decades, Toshitaka Suzuki, designed an experiment in which he first played recordings of call sequences observed in nature to the tit birds in his study area and later played recordings with calls in scrambled sequences.
The birds responded with expected behavior to the first set of calls. However, when Suzuki played mixed-up calls like “gather alert,” the birds did nothing. They knew the meaning of each call, but when the calls were put together wrongly, the birds couldn’t interpret them: It was bad bird grammar.
The Fundamentals of Genuine Language
So birds have grammar (or syntax), and whales have patterned sound systems (what linguists call phonology). What other elements are needed before we can say that these species are using “language” and not just rudimentary, stimulus-based communication? One criterion is whether the systems are instinctive or learned—are they inborn from birth, or are they passed down from parents to offspring via cultural transmission?
Instinctual Cries vs. Learned Patterns
It may be that bird systems are more instinctual and that birds don’t need the same type of language immersion that humans require to trigger their language abilities.
Finnish tit birds can understand the calls of their Japanese cousins—and they also ignore the same ungrammatical sequences. And baby birds seem to understand the various calls from birth. Even if they’ve never seen a snake or a hawk, they respond according to each call; they crouch down in their nest to avoid a hawk who might dive into their hiding place, but they fly away (if they have the ability) to avoid the snake, which will try to crawl in.
On the other hand, researchers believe that sperm whales transmit their language from mother to calf.
And different social groups have different ways of using click and vowel patterns—essentially different dialects—and different individuals have different click rates, just as some humans speak faster than others. It may be that the scientists at CETI are well on their way to discovering a new language.
What Are They Saying?
As exciting as these new discoveries may be, CETI researchers are quick to point out that they still can’t tell us what the whales’ elaborate communications actually mean. Bird languages seem more straightforward—they’re all about food, danger, socializing, and mating. But we don’t yet know the hidden depths of what whales might be talking about.
But with the CETI team’s new perspectives, their goal of translating whale language—its sounds, rhythms, and meanings—may not be all that far away. For now, though, we may still need to rely on the marine telepathy of Aquaman.
