Whalesong patterns follow a universal law of human language, new research finds

By Jenny Allen, Postdoctoral research associate, Griffith University
Ellen Garland, Royal Society University Research Fellow, School of Biology, University of St Andrews
Inbal Arnon, Professor of Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Simon Kirby, Professor of Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh

All known human languages display a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the second most frequent, three times as frequent as the third, and so on. This is known as Zipf’s law.

Researchers have hunted for evidence of this pattern in communication among other species, but until now no other examples have been found.

In new research published today in Science, our team of experts in whale song, linguistics and developmental psychology analysed eight years’ of…

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