Exploring Science
I’m Speaking: Zipf’s Law and Dolphins
Can dolphins communicate? According to ethologist Juliana Lopez-Marulanda of Paris-Saclay University, dolphins use a series of clicks and whistles to synchronize with one another under water, but does this communication qualify as language?
In 1945 a linguist by the name of George Zipf discovered a phenomenon that seemed to apply to all languages. “Zipf’s law states that the most common word in a given language is used exactly twice as frequently as the second most common word and three times more often than the third most common word and so on. If you plot each word on a graph, they create a perfect 45-degree slope.”
However, it was SETI astronomer Laurance Doyle who first applied Zipf’s law to the clicks and whistles of dolphins. Doyle discovered that baby dolphins, much like human babies, babble incoherently when they are first born. At that stage their sounds don’t follow the 45 degree slope of Zipf’s law. Dolphins, like humans, learn their language as they grow. By the time the dolphins are 20 months, they are communicating on the perfect 45 degree slope of Zipf’s law.
Based on this research it is fair to say that dolphins are communicating with one another, but Shawn Noren, a physiological ecologist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, cautions against calling it a language. Noren believes that because dolphins use their clicks for echolocation, it can not be said for sure that they are communicating intentionally.
Sources
https://news.wbfo.org/post/baby-dolphins-babble-when-they-learn-language-just-humans-do
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/08/170810082147.htm