We discovered that the same Zipfian pattern universally found across human languages also occurs in whale song. This complex signaling system, like human language, is culturally learned by each ...

Human languages display a pattern known as Zipf’s law. Now, researchers have found the same pattern in whale song. In all known human languages there is a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in ...

Humpback whale songs have statistical patterns in their structure that are remarkably similar to those seen in human language. While this doesn’t mean the songs convey complex meanings like our ...

The researchers found that the frequency distribution of these subsequences in whale songs closely followed a pattern known as Zipf's law—a hallmark of human language. Zipf's law suggests that ...