Sperm Whales Speak in Vowels, Mirroring Human Language

0:00On April 16th, sperm whale clicks are turning out to be one of the closest things in the animal world to human language. Sciences from Project Cetti just dropped a study showing these rhythmic odys pack different frequencies, kind of like our vowel sounds. They shifted focus from just the timing of clicks to the actual pitch and tone. Turns out there are clicks mimicking A and I vowels. Even diphthongs were too blend together, like in Mandarin. And get this, different whale pods used their own versions, hinting at regional accents down in the deep. Researchers slapped tiny mics on 15 sperm whales for four straight years, then crunched the data with computers. Lead linguist Gopra Bagu from UC Berkeley says, what sounds alien at first actually mirrors us up close. sperm whales got the biggest brains on the planet and share a common ancestor with humans around 90 million years back. The analysis spotted single peaks for A clicks and double peaks for I ones, patterning just like human speech and languages such as Arabic, where

1:01vowel tweaks change meanings, delays in their clicks seem to shift the message to. This work, out in the proceedings of the Roe Society B, points to a super complex system that evolved on its own, making whale talk the tightest. Parallel to hours yet found in nature.