A new study on sperm whale communication reveals that these animals produce sounds like human vowels. The research, published in the journal Open Mind, was part of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), an ongoing effort to listen to and translate sperm whale communication.
Whales communicate with groups of clicks, called codas. To human ears, whale communication sounds like an eerie alien language, a series of very slow clicks.
In previous research, Gašper Beguš, CETI’s lead linguist, found that subtle changes in tempo, called rubato, and extra clicks, called ornamentation, combine with more basic codas to form a much larger set of potential sounds, suggesting a highly structured communication system. Still, it was considered more akin to Morse code than to human language. Until now.
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Understanding Whale Communication Takes Time
As a historical linguist, Beguš spends a lot of time translating texts from dead languages, such as ancient Hittite.
“I love ancient languages, reading these old texts,” he says, “because, in a sense, it allows you to time travel, right? You meet these people who are so similar to us on one hand, but they live in a very different world.”
Whales, too, live in a world very different from ours. “I realized that these whales have a slower way of going about their lives,” Beguš says. “They just operate at a slower pace.”
Beguš took that insight back to the recordings CETI has gathered over the years and started removing the silences between the clicks, making the timing better suited to the human ear. When he did that, something amazing emerged. But it emerged, like whalespeak, very slowly.
It took many months of careful study, like parsing Homeric Greek or Hittite legal texts, but eventually he discovered sounds that are incredibly similar to human vowels. What had previously seemed like Morse code now sounded much like human language.
“All the ingredients that make up our vowels in our speech are there,” he says.
He has found two vowels — a and i — so far, and expects to locate more. He’s also found diphthongs, those rising and falling patterns created by vowel combinations, such as ou in the word “found.”
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Whales Challenge What We Know About Language
Infographic showing human and whale vocalization patterns.
(Image Courtesy of Project CETI/Alex Boersma)
While we don’t know what the whales are communicating, the complexity of these vocalizations, Beguš says, indicates that they might be sharing quite complex thoughts.
“Our language is complex, and we have complex internal thoughts. And so if their language is also complex, that suggests that they, too, have complex internal lives.”
The possibility that whales have complex inner lives raises thorny ethical and legal questions.
“We’re interested in what finding this amount of complexity means for how we think of their rights and how to protect these animals and how to minimize the harm that humans do to them,” says Beguš.
In a 2025 paper published in the journal Ecology Law, he and colleagues wrote, “Proving that cetaceans possess linguistic capacities would challenge the notion that language is exclusive to humans and could reshape legal frameworks, as seen in past reforms following discoveries about great apes.”
Translating Whale Language
(Image Courtesy of Amanda Cotton/Project CETI)
Will we ever be able to translate the language of whales?
“I think we’re making good progress,” Beguš says.
But that’s a big project, and first we’ve got to shake off our human biases, he adds. And that’s a very difficult problem, one that goes far beyond removing the spaces between clicks.
However, translation is not the only goal of the project.
“Personally, my motivation for running this project is as an example of how technology can bring us closer to animals that are very hard to interact with,” says David Gruber, founder and president of Project CETI.
The more we know about them, the better we can help them, he adds. And, perhaps, the more we’ll want to help them. As Beguš and colleagues write,
“The history of nonhuman animal law makes clear that science and public sentiment have and will continue to play a leading role in moving the needle on the treatment, protection, and conservation of nonhuman animals.”
Meanwhile, Project CETI is listening.
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