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.<\/p>\n
The structure of the whales\u2019 communication has \u201cclose parallels in the phonetics and phonology of human languages, suggesting independent evolution\u201d, the paper, published in the Proceedings B journal<\/a>, states. Sperm whale coda vocalizations are \u201chighly complex and represent one of the closest parallels to human phonology of any analyzed animal communication system\u201d, it added.<\/p>\n The findings are the latest discovery about the lives of sperm whales by Project Ceti (standing for Cetacean Translation Initiative), an organization that has studied whales off the coast of Dominica in an attempt to find out what they are saying<\/a>. Last month, the project released video of a sperm whale giving birth<\/a> while other whales supported it.<\/p>\n Until the 1950s, it was not clear to scientists that sperm whales even vocalized but modern technology, including artificial intelligence, is helping unlock the language of these creatures \u2013 with unexpected similarities to our own speech.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s another humbling moment that we\u2019re not the only species with rich, communicative, communal and cultural lives,\u201d said David Gruber, founder and president of Project CETI.<\/p>\n \u201cThese whales could be passing information along generation to generation to generation for over 20 million years. Humans now are just having the right tools and desire to be able to look at whale voices in this way to see the complexity that has been there all along.\u201d<\/p>\n Studying sperm whales can be challenging \u2013 they dive deep underwater for up to 50 minutes in search of squid to eat, only surfacing for 10 minutes at a time. But it\u2019s near the surface where the animals \u201cchit-chat\u201d, as Gruber put it, with their heads close together.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you watch sperm whales, they put their heads right together and click into each other\u2019s heads,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s like if you wanted to talk to someone about a Chaucer novel or something \u2013 you wouldn\u2019t want to do that from opposite ends of a football stadium. You would want to get real close to have a real sophisticated conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n That sperm whale conversation sounds, to our ears, little more than a staccato morse code. But by removing the gaps between the clicks, researchers were able to find patterns strikingly similar to human speech. Much like how we alter our vocal folds to change an \u201cA\u201d sound into an \u201cE\u201d sound, whales can manipulate vowel sounds into different meanings.<\/p>\n Ga\u0161per Begu\u0161, a linguist at University of California, Berkeley who led the new paper, said that this level of complexity in sperm whale speech was beyond anything he had studied in other creatures, such as parrots and elephants, and highlights the parallels between our lives and those of the whales.<\/p>\n \u201cThey have very different lives to us \u2013 they\u2019re not stuck to the ground all the time, they float in the water, they sleep vertically,\u201d said Begu\u0161.<\/p>\n \u201cYet you realize that there\u2019s a lot that unifies us. They have grandmas, they babysit each other\u2019s calves, they give collaborative births, they\u2019re very loud during a birth and so on. It\u2019s such a distant intelligence, but in many ways very relatable.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"How](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1776252248_975_1920.jpg\")
How sperm whale communication is similar to human language \u2013\u00a0video <\/p>\n