The Stunning Similarity Whale Songs Have To Human Speech

It has long been upheld that human beings are the only animals with the power of language. Other species are of course capable of conveying information both vocally and physically, but it's thought that these forms of communicating are much more primitive than the languages of humans. Our language, unlike animal mating calls or the cries of a child for its mother, is not preprogrammed into us at birth, but rather something that we learn over time. This characteristic — acquired language — sets us apart from other animals ... but maybe not.

There is an ever-growing wealth of research suggesting that the world of animal communication is much more complex than we once thought, from the squawking of parrots to the low-frequency communications of elephants and, perhaps most notably, the songs of humpback whales.

Male humpback whales vocalize in the form of songs that can last over half an hour, which are acquired through learning.  Language acquisition begins in the juvenile stage of the whale's life cycle and evolves over years. Although female whales vocalize, scientists are uncertain why they do not sing as well. Because whale song is most often heard during breeding season, it's theorized it's related to attracting a mate or dominance displays.

A new study, published in February 2025 in the journal Science reveals that the language learning process for humpback whales is remarkably similar to our own. There is a pattern known as Zipf's law of frequency, which determines how commonly certain words occur, and it turns out that the songs of humpback whales follow this law just like we do.

Zipf's law states that the most frequently used word in any language occurs twice as often as the next most common, three times as often as the third most, and so on for roughly the first 1,000 most commonly used words. In English, the most used word is "the," which accounts for roughly one out of every 10 words used in any given text. The second most common English word, "of," accounts for roughly one in every 20 words. As the recent study reveals, the songs of male humpback whales follow this same pattern of frequency.

Researchers analyzed eight years' worth of recordings and identified repeating sound combinations within each song, similar to words within a sentence. In keeping with Zipf's law, the most commonly-used sound combinations within a given humpback population occur twice as frequently as the second most-common. Another similarity to human language is that almost all of the most commonly-used sound combinations are short, like the words "the," and "of," while longer sound combinations are generally rarer, something known as the brevity law.

Zipf's law of frequency plays an important role in language learning for us humans. The pattern is present in our speech from early childhood, an organizational structure that helps us learn from the people speaking around us. It appears that the same goes for juvenile humpback whales, despite the fact that their last common ancestor with us was a tiny rodent-like creature that lived over 100 million years ago.