Researchers have found a pattern indicating certain ‘words’ are used more often than others – but humans won’t be speaking whale any time soon
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Humpback whale song is structured in a similar way to human language – with shorter sounds used far more often than more complex ones – a structure which helps infants quickly learn how to communicate from their elders in both species.
Across languages and whale song, some words, or word-like elements, are used frequently while others are infrequent. They follow a pattern known as “Zipfian distribution”, where the most used word in a language (like “the”) is used about twice as often as the second most common word, and three times as frequent as the third most common word and so on.
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