Dolphins Might Be Speaking Something Close to a Real Language

There’s a pretty decent chance that dolphins do more than just call each other’s names. Photo: Unsplash

Dolphins, as you probably know, are incredibly intelligent creatures. Not just because they can jump through hoops for fish or whatever — that’s likely not something they would tell us they’d like to learn how to do if they could speak — but because they’ve shown themselves to have complex social structures, hunting patterns, and advanced communication systems. We’ve known for a while now that they use different clicks and whistles to call each other by name, but according to new research, those sounds aren’t just names. They could also indicate that they’re able to transmit concepts to one another.

Our quest to communicate with dolphins took an interesting turn in recent months, when Google announced an AI modeling system called DolphinGemma that might get us closer than ever to doing so.

The research in the new study has yet to be peer reviewed, but if and when it is, it will be some of the best evidence yet that dolphins do indeed have something like a language. For years, researchers have been cataloging signature whistles from dolphins in certain populations around the globe, and they’re fairly confident that they are what we’d describe as names. But Laela Sayigh, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, has been studying the other sounds they make that aren’t part of those groups of signature sounds.

Sayigh and her colleagues have been using data collected by the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program in Florida since 2012, compiling sounds and images of the dolphins’ markings, so they’ve got a ton of information about a community of around 170 bottlenose dolphins that call Sarasota Bay home.

“We know all of these animals, we know their age, their sex, their entire lineages,” Sayigh said to New Scientist. “When I do a playback with a certain animal, I know who’s its mum, who’s its sister and who it’s been hanging out with for the last few months.”

So far, the team has identified 22 whistles made by multiple dolphins that aren’t signature sounds. In their study, they found that one whistle was produced by 35 of the dolphins. Another was repeated by 25. “Those numbers keep climbing the more analysis I do,” Sayigh said.

The two whistles, at first glance, appear to be warning calls mostly made by males. To test their theory, the researchers recorded those whistles, then played them via underwater speakers to six dolphins. Five of them fled the area. In their control test, in which they played signature sounds — dolphin names, basically — 19 dolphins were played their own signature whistle. Only seven of them moved away, which was a response rate of less that half of that of what the researchers believe is an alarm whistle.

“I’ve actually spent most of my career arguing that there isn’t evidence for language-like communication in dolphins, but I do feel like a lot of the pieces are there in dolphins,” Sayigh continued. “Like the fact that they are flexible, lifelong vocal learners.”

Another dolphin researcher, Julie Oswald at the University of St. Andrews in the UK, believes that dolphins are communicating ideas to one another beyond just calling each others’ names. She doesn’t, however, believe that it means they have their own language. Not yet, at least.

“I definitely think they’re communicating,” she told New Scientist, “but at this point, I don’t think we could call it language.”

The authors of the study tend to disagree slightly with Oswald, but defining what a “language” really actually means is a bit of a grey area.

“Overall, our study provides the first evidence in dolphins for a wider repertoire of shared, context-specific signals,” the researchers concluded, “which could form the basis for a language-like communication system.”

If we ever are able to conclude that dolphins have a language, and if we ever are able to learn to speak it, are we going to like what they have to say to us? Likely not.