{"id":382500,"date":"2026-04-16T13:07:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T13:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/382500\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T13:07:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T13:07:07","slug":"sperm-whales-speak-with-a-complex-alphabet-and-even-have-vowels-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/382500\/","title":{"rendered":"Sperm Whales Speak With a Complex Alphabet and Even Have \u2018Vowels,\u2019 Study Finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sperm whales: They\u2019re just like us. An international team of researchers, including marine biologists and linguists, reports<\/a> that it has detected signs of a \u201chighly complex\u201d phonetic alphabet in the calls of sperm whales\u2014including \u201cvowels\u201d deployed in patterns akin to their use in human languages like Mandarin, Latin, and Slovenian.<\/p>\n

The scientists described the whale calls as one of the \u201cclosest parallels\u201d to human phonetic speech patterns of \u201cany analysed animal communication system,\u201d according to their new study, published Wednesday in the UK\u2019s Royal Society journal Proceedings B. The research builds on years of deep machine learning analysis of sperm whale calls<\/a>, organized by the nonprofit Project CETI<\/a> (short for \u201cCetacean Translation Initiative,\u201d but a playful allusion to SETI, the \u201cSearch for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence\u201d<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Project CETI, you may recall, is the same group that recently released footage showing adult sperm whales collaborating as doulas to help one of their own give birth<\/a>. That research<\/a>, along with CETI\u2019s linguistic efforts, has focused on a community of sperm whales living off the coast of Dominica in the Eastern Caribbean.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the surface, [sperm whale calls] sound like this alien, ocean intelligence that has nothing to do with us,\u201d as the new study\u2019s lead author Ga\u0161per Begu\u0161, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told<\/a> Scientific American.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut when you actually look at it closely,\u201d he said, \u201cyou realize, \u2018Oh, we\u2019re way more similar.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Something clicked <\/p>\n

Sperm whales spend only a fleeting amount of time near the ocean\u2019s surface\u2014about ten minutes every hour\u2014in between 50 minute bouts of deep-sea dives hunting for squid, their preferred wild caught meal. Fortunately, for Begu\u0161 and his colleagues, the surface acts almost like a watercooler where these sperm whales can take a break and trade notes.<\/p>\n

The team\u2019s new research worked with recordings of whale vocalizations collected between 2014 and 2018 by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, which captured conversational series of short clicks, termed codas, communicated between whales usually at very close range, head to head. The CETI team\u2019s prior research<\/a> used generative adversarial networks (GANs)\u2014machine learning models that can pull patterns out of preexisting datasets\u2014to help them identify sperm whale vowels and vowel combos, called diphthongs, that led to them to dig deeper into whale phonics.<\/p>\n

\u201cGANs can discover words and meaningful structure,\u201d Begu\u0161 noted in a press statement<\/a> in November 2025. \u201cWe still need human researchers to analyze the details, but they help us look in a specific direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore, researchers focused primarily on whale clicks and inter-click timing,\u201d he said. \u201cAnalyzing vowels adds a completely new dimension that brings much more complexity.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new work from Begu\u0161 and his colleagues notes that the sperm whale vowels could be further differentiated based on (among other things) the duration of \u201cinter-click intervals,\u201d or ICIs. This can include even paced clicks, clicks with a decelerating pace of wider ICIs, or clicks with an accelerating pace of tighter ICIs. The CETI team compared these to tonal changes of vowels in Mandarin Chinese, where simple shifts in pitch or tone can radically change the meaning of a word. (For instance, with a high and level tone, ma means \u201cmother\u201d in Mandarin, but with a falling-rising tone, ma means \u201chorse.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u201cOur analogy has a limit,\u201d the team noted in their study, which also made comparisons to Slovenian and Latin. \u201c[W]hile in human languages, different tones can be associated with different meanings, the meanings conveyed by sperm whale codas have not been established.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whale-to-human communication, when? <\/p>\n

According to Begu\u0161, his team hopes to be fully able to understand and communicate roughly 20 unique sperm whale expressions, such as verbs related to diving and sleep, by 2031.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s totally within our grasp,\u201d as he put<\/a> it to The Guardian. \u201cWe\u2019ve 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\u2019 time, maybe we will be more like a five-year-old.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prior to the vowel research, Project CETI had previously managed to discern 156 unique click patterns from these datasets, which may help form part of these sperm whales\u2019 vocabulary, or at least these Caribbean whale\u2019s local dialect<\/a>. That variance between sperm whale communities across the world\u2019s oceans is just another one of the ways in which these creatures have proven themselves to be surprisingly human.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe exchange inner worlds through speech, through vowels and consonants,\u201d Begu\u0161 noted. \u201cThis is a small step towards understanding the inner worlds of animals, their cultures and their intelligences.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sperm whales: They\u2019re just like us. An international team of researchers, including marine biologists and linguists, reports that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":382501,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[102387,2489,153,111,139,69,147,28975,406],"class_list":{"0":"post-382500","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-linguistics","9":"tag-machine-learning","10":"tag-marine-biology","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-science","15":"tag-whales","16":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/382501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}