A new study published in Science reveals that humpback whale songs share statistical structures with human language, specifically Zipfian distribution and Zipf's law of brevity. Researchers analyzed eight years of humpback whale song recordings from New Caledonia using methods typically used to evaluate infant speech. Key findings: * Whale songs exhibit statistically coherent subsequences conforming to Zipfian distribution, similar to human language. * The lengths of these subsequences adhere to Zipf's law of brevity. * This suggests that cultural transmission and learning play a significant role in shaping communication systems across species. The study highlights the importance of cultural transmission in learning complex communication systems and challenges the idea that such structural properties are exclusive to human language. Researchers suggest that humpback whales may learn their songs by tracking transitional probabilities between sound elements, similar to how human babies learn language. The research team was led by Inbal Arnon, Emma Carroll, and Jenny Allen.