Groups of pilot whales have their own dialects

Date:  December 19, 2018

Source:  Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

The groups of pilot whales all use the same habitat, but have different vocal repertoires. This means that they're purposely not associating with each other, says WHOI researcher Amy Van Cise.

Credit: Photo by Amy Van Cise, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

In humans, different social groups, cities, or regions often have distinct accents and dialects. Those vocal traits are not unique to us, however. A new study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has found that short-finned pilot whales living off the coast of Hawai'i have their own sorts of vocal dialects, a discovery that may help researchers understand the whales' complex social structure. The study was published on Dec. 14, 2018, in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

"These groups of pilot whales all use the same habitat. The fact that they have different vocal repertoires means that they're purposely not associating with each other," says Amy Van Cise, a Postdoctoral Scholar at WHOI and lead author on the study. "It's sort of like if you've got hipsters and prep kids in the same high school -- each group has different slang. They identify themselves with certain speech to maintain that separation."

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Wolf species have ‘howling dialects’

Date:February 8, 2016

Source:University of Cambridge

Largest quantitative study of howling, and first to use machine learning, defines different howl types and finds that wolves use these types more or less depending on their species, resembling a howling dialect. Researchers say findings could help conservation efforts and shed light on the earliest evolution of our own use of language.

The largest ever study of howling in the 'canid' family of species -- which includes wolves, jackals and domestic dogs -- has shown that the various species and subspecies have distinguishing repertoires of howling, or "vocal fingerprints": different types of howls are used with varying regularity depending on the canid species.

Researchers used computer algorithms for the first time to analyse howling, distilling over 2,000 different howls into 21 howl types based on pitch and fluctuation, and then matching up patterns of howling.

They found that the frequency with which types of howls are used -- from flat to highly modulated -- corresponded to the species of canid, whether dog or coyote, as well as to the subspecies of wolf.

For example, the howling repertoire of the timber wolf is heavy with low, flat howls but doesn't feature the high, looping vocal that is the most frequently used in the range of howls deployed by critically-endangered red wolves.

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Ahoy y’all: Sperm whale clans communicate in different, distinct dialects

SEPTEMBER 9, 2015

by Cat Wilson

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines dialect as, “[A] variety of a language that signals where a person comes from.” It also notes that class and occupation may contribute to dialects. Dialects show up in some interesting places, such as in American Sign Language (ASL), as catalogued by Ethnologue, a compendium of languages. And now, another notable variation has been discovered in a group of sperm whales around the Galapagos Islands. According to National Geographic, this group--consisting of thousands of female sperm whales and their calves--has sorted itself into clans defined by dialects, or a distinct series of clicks also known as codas.

Published in the journal Nature Communications, the study attempted to figure out what drove the clan structure, which had been observed, but whose formations were a mystery. According to the study, scientists have been observing the clans for more than 30 years. It is only in the last 18 that they have collected the empirical data which resulted in the finding.

A complex social structure

People have long debated and wondered what separates humans from (other) animals. Many theories have been proposed, among them language and the use of tools. Ars Technica reviewed a paper from the peer-reviewed journal Current Anthropology that even proposes our ability to wonder what separates humans from animals is the exact the characteristic that separates humans from animals. Thomas Suddendorf, author of The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals, quotes Bertrand Russell’s laundry list of aspects: speech, fire, agriculture, writing, tools, and large-scale cooperation, before neatly debunking most of them in turn.

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