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 ...

The sounds that make up humpback whale songs follow some of the same statistical rules seen in human languages, which may be because of how they are learned ...

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 ...