Zipf's Law in Whale Song: A Striking Similarity in Cultural Learning

New research reveals that humpback whale songs exhibit the same Zipfian distribution found in human languages—the most frequent word is twice as frequent as the second, and so on. Researchers analyzed eight years of whale song recordings, using techniques inspired by how human infants learn language, to uncover this pattern. This suggests both human language and whale song possess statistically coherent parts, following Zipf's law, likely because cultural learning makes learning easier and promotes the emergence of these properties. However, this doesn't mean we can talk to whales; the meaning of whale song remains unknown. Future research will explore other species, such as songbirds, to test whether cultural learning is the common driver of this phenomenon.