Whales talk.
Whales are one of the most mind-bending topics there is right now, because we're living through the moment when scientists are starting to crack it.
Clicks that may be an alphabet
Sperm whales communicate in short bursts of clicks called codas. For decades, researchers treated these as a small, fixed vocabulary.
Then, in 2024, Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative, a deliberate nod to SETI) showed that codas vary along several independent dimensions, like rhythm, tempo, and tiny added “ornament” clicks. These combine the way letters or sounds combine in human speech. The result is a far bigger combinatorial system than anyone thought.
They might even have vowels
A more recent study found something stranger. Berkeley linguist Gašper Beguš says researchers used to think of whale communication as a kind of Morse code, but the calls turn out to be more like very, very slow vowels.
Just as humans shape sounds with mouths and vocal cords, sperm whales use phonic lips and an air sac, manipulated in a similar way. Researchers also reported diphthongs, the gliding vowel sounds in words like “boy.”
To be fair, these suggestions are still up for debate. But nobody was even asking these questions ten years ago.
Dialects define their tribes
Sperm whales live in clans that share ocean space but keep separate, and each clan has its own identity codas: essentially an acoustic flag saying “we are us.”
Two groups can swim in the same waters and still sort each other by accent.
Humpback songs go viral across oceans
Male humpbacks sing long, structured songs, and every whale in a population sings roughly the same one.
When a new song appears, often among whales off eastern Australia, it can sweep eastward across the South Pacific population by population over a couple of years, replacing the old song entirely. It's cultural transmission on an ocean-basin scale: basically a whale hit single going global.
Humpback song follows the same law as human language
A 2025 study found that when you break humpback songs into recurring units, their frequencies follow Zipf's law: the pattern where a few words (like “the”) are extremely common and most are rare.
That pattern shows up in every human language, and it's thought to arise from how learned, culturally transmitted systems get passed on. Whales hit the same math independently.
A birth, and a change in voice
The newest chapter is genuinely moving. Project CETI researchers witnessed the birth of a sperm whale and observed a remarkable scene of cooperation and communication that few humans have ever seen.
That led to papers this year on cooperation by non-kin during birth, and on shifts in coda vocal styles during key events. In other words, the whales' “way of speaking” changed around the birth itself.
End of transmission
One last thing to sit with: sperm whale clicks are the loudest sounds made by any animal, loud enough to travel for many kilometers underwater.
These conversations have been happening in the deep, in the dark, for millions of years, long before anyone was around to listen.