Research Proposal
Professor Norris,
Language is what makes us human. Other great apes match us, to varying degrees, on virtually every other metric (our propensity for tool use, I would argue, hinges first on language and our ability to communicate complex ideas). There is no other function which every human uses; it defines our species. Across the animal kingdom, we are the only species which has developed such an intricate and wildly complicated method of communication — or, so it seems. As it turns out, there is another group of animals which may approach some semblance of what we think of as language: cetaceans. Yes, those blubbery, marine-adapted mammals hold, in their idiosyncratic whistling and clicking, the closest thing to human language seen anywhere else in the animal world. Further, these animals exhibit another otherwise uniquely hominid feature: culture. As interesting as it would be to investigate the link between language and culture in particular, if we’re looking into cetacean language there is a more fundamental issue to address. Do the communication strategies of cetaceans such as bottlenose dolphins or humpback whales qualify as “language”?
I have studied various languages and general comparative linguistics for some years as a hobbyist, and thus have some familiarity with the technicality of language and its expression in language academics. I am new to the academic world of study around marine mammals, but for a long time I have held an amateur interest in comparative anatomical morphology — essentially, how things evolved into analogous structures, such as the fact that the various finger and hand bones are still present in a whale’s flippers despite millions of years of evolution adapting the limb into a different shape and purpose.
There is already a fair amount of research into this idea, and the research is ongoing. One relevant article, “Whale song shows language-like statistical structure” by Arnon et al. (2025) in the journal Science was published just a few days ago.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Ethan.
References
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.adq7055