The song of the whales follows Zipf’s mysterious law, just like human language

In the 1940s, a linguist from Harvard University called George Zipf realized the existence of a pattern in the frequency of the use of each word in a language, whatever it is. If we look at any book or text, the second most frequent word is repeated half of the times than the first; the third, a third of the time; The fourth, a room … and so on. Why this rule occurs, it is still a mystery. In Spanish, according to the SAR, the most repeated words are ‘de’, ‘la’, ‘that’, ‘el’, ‘in’, ‘and’, ‘a’, ‘los’,’ se ‘and’ of the ‘. One in four words we use is in that group.

Now, an international team of scientists has discovered that Zipf’s law does not regulate human language. Surprisingly, the songs of the humpback whales also follow the same rule. The findings, published in the magazine ‘Science’, They suggest that both forms of communication, complex and culturally transmitted, share a similar structure despite belonging to two species, whales and humans, evolutionarily so remote.

The song of humpback whales is melodious and exciting. Each population of males has its own song, which premieres in spring and exhibits a systematic structure. However, until now, there was little evidence that this structure was like that of human language. The authors used the knowledge acquired about how babies discover the words in speech and applied them to the songs of the whales recorded for eight years in Nueva Caledonia to discover the relevant parts of the system.

In this way, they realized that the song of the whales showed the same statistical properties present in all known human languages, that is, Zipf’s law followed. They detected recurring parts whose frequency closely followed a particular biased distribution, which had not previously been found in any other non -human animal.

Educational function

But why does this happen? Researchers believe it can have an ‘educational’ function. Some investigations suggest that this distribution of the words marked by Zipf’s law can facilitate language learning and transmission.

“This raises the intriguing possibility that humpback whales, like human babies, can learn their song by tracking the probabilities of transition between sound elements and using falls in those probabilities as a sign to segment the song,” explains Inbal Arnon, of the Hebrew University and co -author of the study.

For Ellen Garland, from the University of St Andrews and also co -author of the study «revealing this hidden structure similar to a language in the singing of the whales was unexpected, but firmly suggests that this cultural behavior contains crucial information about the evolution of complex communication throughout the animal kingdom ».

But Garland clarifies: «The song of whales is not a language; It lacks semantic meaning. Maybe remember human music more, which also has this statistical structure, but lacks the expressive meaning found in language ». And he warns: “It is not clear if the units we detect using the method inspired by babies are relevant to the whales themselves.”

According to Simon Kirby, from the University of Edinburgh, the results “suggest that our understanding of the evolution of language can benefit not only from the study of our closest primates, but also of cases of convergent evolution in other parts of nature.” Therefore, beyond the way language is used to express meaning, “we should consider how it is learned and transmitted culturally throughout multiple generations.”

In addition, work demonstrates that fundamental aspects of human language, which in the past were considered the distinctive seal of human singularity, could be shared between evolutionarily distant species. One less than humans have exclusivity.