Humpback whale song shown to be structurally similar to human language
Humpback whale song shown to be structurally similar to human language

Humpback whale song shown to be structurally similar to human language

Apparently humpback whale songs show a few features in common with human language; such as being culturally transmitted through social interactions between whales.
"The authors found that whale song showed the same key statistical properties present in all known human languages" - my guess is that the author talks about Zipf's Law, that applies to both phoneme frequency and word frequency in human languages.
[Dr. Garland] "Whale song is not a language; it lacks semantic meaning. It may be more reminiscent of human music, which also has this statistical structure, but lacks the expressive meaning found in language." - so while it is not language yet it's considerably closer to language than we'd expect, specially from non-primates.