Annotated Bibliography
Research Question
To what extent can whales or their relatives be said to have “language” or not?
Sources
Arnon, I., Kirby, S., Allen, J. A., Garrigue, C., Carroll, E. L., & Garland, E. C. (2025). Whale song shows language-like statistical structure. Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 387(6734), 649–653. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq70558
In this article, Arnon et al. (2025) investigate the statistical structure of humpback whale song. They show that humpback whale communications contain repeating units which follow a Zipfian distribution – a property of human language that shows that the most common words in human speech follows a power law curve. This type of statistical coherence is thought to facilitate learning and the faithful transmission of language across generations. That this also is evident in humpback whale communication is compelling evidence that their communications are information-rich. This will be used in my argument as supporting evidence for the idea that whales communicate via their own form of language.
Cannon, Cutler. “A Theoretical Account of Whale Song Syntax: A New Perspective for Understanding Human Language Structure.” Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, vol. 8, no. 1, 2023, pp. 5571-, https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v8i1.5571.
In this article, Cutler (2023) discusses language and syntactic structure broadly and provides a theoretical framework for whale language. The article spends some time discussing theories of language at large, i.e. what actually is a language to begin with, and gives some insight on the question of how we classify them. This structure is contrasted with other complex but non-language-like communication structures which appear in nature, such as birdsong. I intend to use this article to demonstrate why whales specifically are so interesting to linguists, and also to give deeper insight on how whale language could work if some assumptions are made.
Garland, E. C., Rendell, L., Lamoni, L., Poole, M. M., & Noad, M. J. (2017). Song hybridization events during revolutionary song change provide insights into cultural transmission in humpback whales. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(30), 7822–7829. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26486118
Garland et. al. (2017) talk about research into the hybridization of whale songs, which is when a whale is adopting the song of a different group of whales. These ‘hybridization events’ give us key insights into the learning processes by which humpbacks learn their songs, and how they are culturally transmitted. They found that when whales were transitioning to a new song, they sometimes produced hybrid songs that combined elements of the old and new songs. These hybridization events occurred in two distinct ways: either through single hybrid phrases blended content from both songs, or by splicing complete themes from the revolutionary song into the existing song structure. Notably, these splicing events seemed to take place at points where the two songs had similar sounds arranged in similar patterns. This is useful for discussing possible means of language acquisition.
Grebowicz, Margret. Whale Song. Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017.
In this book, Grebowicz (2017) discusses cetaceans at large, and covers everything from their cultural perception shifting to details about various research projects looking into different kinds of whales’ communication. She discusses the history of scientific attempts to understand whale communication, as well as the cultural impact of whale songs. Grebowicz examines what whales have meant to humans and how that has changed, and she explains some of the challenges of attempting interspecies communication. It gives a good overview of the topic in a wider context, and for my article will be useful to draw upon for that purpose. It also provides some pathos.
Harrison, Jack. “Music, Language, and Technology in More-Than-Human Sonic Cultures.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 149, no. 2, 2024, pp. 627–37, https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2024.39.
In this article, Harrison (2024) explores the intersection of music and language. He focuses on the syntactic structure of sperm whale vocalizations. Research by the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CeTI) is discussed, and an attempt is made to use AI to analyze sperm whale coda clicks. Some ways that these codas may be parsed syntactically are discussed, revealing another possible parallelism to human language. The author discusses what is known about their vocalization methods, describes their structure, and also talks about what is not known yet – the actual meanings of these codas, for instance, is entirely unknown. It also talks about the fact that whale language may be more analogous to music than to language. This article will be a useful source for generalizations, as well as for addressing counter-arguments such as the possibility that whale song is not language at all, and rather may be more analogous to music (which also shows some language-like structure when viewed through a statistical lens).
Whiten, A., & Youngblood, M. (2025). Convergent evolution in whale and human vocal cultures. Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 387(6734), 581–582. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adv2318
In this article, Whiten et al. (2025) discuss recent literature on humpback whale communication and show that humpback whale vocalizations exhibit a similar hierarchical structure to human language. They discuss the significance of the observations and suggest that they may indicate convergent evolution, which may have implications for what communication paradigms are effective in nature. It may also have implications for how language originally developed in humans. This will be useful for discussing why we might expect whale communication to be language-like in the first place when they are not a close relative of humans, especially given the fact that our actual close relatives do not exhibit language-like communication.
Youngblood, Mason. (2025, February 5). Language-like efficiency in whale communication. Science Advances, 11(6), eads6014. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ads6014
In this article, Youngblood (2025) shows detailed data which demonstrate that humpback whale language exhibits two different Zipfian laws – the power law, as discussed in other sources, and also Zipf’s law of abbreviation, which is also characteristic of humans language. Additionally, the study found that humpback whale vocalizations appear to follow other communication-efficiency principles seen in human language. One of these is Menzerath’s law, which states that longer sequences have shorter elements. The author clarifies that this does not necessarily mean (and there still is no evidence to suggest that) their communication encodes the same kind of information that human language does. I will use this as a source supporting the idea that whales have a language-like communication system, as it demonstrates that, language or not, whales and especially humpbacks can be empirically shown to have very nuanced, complex communication strategies which show signs of having been optimized for efficiency.