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Sperm whales: They’re just like us. An international team of researchers, including marine biologists and linguists, reports that it has detected signs of a “highly complex” phonetic alphabet in the calls of sperm whales—including “vowels” deployed in patterns akin to their use in human languages like Mandarin, Latin, and Slovenian.
The scientists described the whale calls as one of the “closest parallels” to human phonetic speech patterns of “any analysed animal communication system,” according to their new study, published Wednesday in the UK’s Royal Society journal Proceedings B. The research builds on years of deep machine learning analysis of sperm whale calls, organized by the nonprofit Project CETI (short for “Cetacean Translation Initiative,” but a playful allusion to SETI, the “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence”).
Project CETI, you may recall, is the same group that recently released footage showing adult sperm whales collaborating as doulas to help one of their own give birth. That research, along with CETI’s linguistic efforts, has focused on a community of sperm whales living off the coast of Dominica in the Eastern Caribbean.
“On the surface, [sperm whale calls] sound like this alien, ocean intelligence that has nothing to do with us,” as the new study’s lead author Gašper Beguš, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Scientific American.
“But when you actually look at it closely,” he said, “you realize, ‘Oh, we’re way more similar.’”
Sperm whales spend only a fleeting amount of time near the ocean’s surface—about ten minutes every hour—in between 50 minute bouts of deep-sea dives hunting for squid, their preferred wild caught meal. Fortunately, for Beguš and his colleagues, the surface acts almost like a watercooler where these sperm whales can take a break and trade notes.
The team’s new research worked with recordings of whale vocalizations collected between 2014 and 2018 by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, which captured conversational series of short clicks, termed codas, communicated between whales usually at very close range, head to head. The CETI team’s prior research used generative adversarial networks (GANs)—machine learning models that can pull patterns out of preexisting datasets—to help them identify sperm whale vowels and vowel combos, called diphthongs, that led to them to dig deeper into whale phonics.
“GANs can discover words and meaningful structure,” Beguš noted in a press statement in November 2025. “We still need human researchers to analyze the details, but they help us look in a specific direction.”
“Before, researchers focused primarily on whale clicks and inter-click timing,” he said. “Analyzing vowels adds a completely new dimension that brings much more complexity.”
The new work from Beguš and his colleagues notes that the sperm whale vowels could be further differentiated based on (among other things) the duration of “inter-click intervals,” or ICIs. This can include even paced clicks, clicks with a decelerating pace of wider ICIs, or clicks with an accelerating pace of tighter ICIs. The CETI team compared these to tonal changes of vowels in Mandarin Chinese, where simple shifts in pitch or tone can radically change the meaning of a word. (For instance, with a high and level tone, ma means “mother” in Mandarin, but with a falling-rising tone, ma means “horse.”)
“Our analogy has a limit,” the team noted in their study, which also made comparisons to Slovenian and Latin. “[W]hile in human languages, different tones can be associated with different meanings, the meanings conveyed by sperm whale codas have not been established.”
According to Beguš, his team hopes to be fully able to understand and communicate roughly 20 unique sperm whale expressions, such as verbs related to diving and sleep, by 2031.
“It’s totally within our grasp,” as he put it to The Guardian. “We’ve already got a lot further than I thought we could. But it will take time, and funding. At the moment we are like a two-year-old, just saying a few words. In a few years’ time, maybe we will be more like a five-year-old.”
Prior to the vowel research, Project CETI had previously managed to discern 156 unique click patterns from these datasets, which may help form part of these sperm whales’ vocabulary, or at least these Caribbean whale’s local dialect. That variance between sperm whale communities across the world’s oceans is just another one of the ways in which these creatures have proven themselves to be surprisingly human.
“We exchange inner worlds through speech, through vowels and consonants,” Beguš noted. “This is a small step towards understanding the inner worlds of animals, their cultures and their intelligences.”
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