Sperm Whales Speak With a Complex Alphabet and Even Have ‘Vowels,’ Study Finds
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
Sperm whales: They're just like us. An international team of researchers, including marine biologists and linguists, reports that it has detected signs of a highly complex" phonetic alphabet in the calls of sperm whales-including vowels" deployed in patterns akin to their use in human languages like Mandarin, Latin, and Slovenian.
The scientists described the whale calls as one of the closest parallels" to human phonetic speech patterns of any analysed animal communication system," according to their new study, published Wednesday in the UK's Royal Society journal Proceedings B. The research builds on years of deep machine learning analysis of sperm whale calls, organized by the nonprofit Project CETI (short for Cetacean Translation Initiative," but a playful allusion to SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence").
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. That research, along with CETI's linguistic efforts, has focused on a community of sperm whales living off the coast of Dominica in the Eastern Caribbean.
On the surface, [sperm whale calls] sound like this alien, ocean intelligence that has nothing to do with us," as the new study's lead author Gaper Begu, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Scientific American.
But when you actually look at it closely," he said, you realize, Oh, we're way more similar.'"
Sperm whales spend only a fleeting amount of time near the ocean's surface-about ten minutes every hour-in between 50 minute bouts of deep-sea dives hunting for squid, their preferred wild caught meal. Fortunately, for Begu and his colleagues, the surface acts almost like a watercooler where these sperm whales can take a break and trade notes.
The team's 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's prior research used generative adversarial networks (GANs)-machine learning models that can pull patterns out of preexisting datasets-to help them identify sperm whale vowels and vowel combos, called diphthongs, that led to them to dig deeper into whale phonics.
GANs can discover words and meaningful structure," Begu noted in a press statement in November 2025. We still need human researchers to analyze the details, but they help us look in a specific direction."
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