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Linguist: “Maybe we'll be able to talk to whales within 20 years”
Researchers know that whales communicate with each other, but they don't know what they are saying.
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A few years ago, there was a lot of talk about the beluga whale Hvaldimir, who swam from Russia to Norway. He retrieved mobile phones from the seabed, got ropes tangled in boat engines, and became quite a celebrity.
But there is still a lot we don't know.
Was he trained as a spy by the Russian military?
It's impossible to know – and sadly, he is now dead. We never had the chance to ask him.
But if new research is to be believed, it may be possible to talk to whales in the future.
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We will soon know more
“I don't think it's that far off,” says Marit Lobben.
She studies language and the brain at the University of Oslo.
“Maybe we’ll be able to talk to whales within 20 years,” she says.
Researchers know that whales talk to one another, but they still don't know exactly what they are saying.
The challenge is understanding a language that is very different from our own. But humans have managed to decipher unknown languages before.
Language from a stone?
The Rosetta Stone helped researchers understand Egyptian hieroglyphs. Vikings travelling to unfamilliar lands also managed to learn local languages without the help of dictionaries.
“We reckon they learned a lot by just jumping into it and trying to talk to people. They might have learned a few words and used body language. And then gradually learned a little more,” researcher Elise Kleivane said in a previous article on Science Norway.
“If we want to understand whale language, researchers will have to do something similar to what the Vikings did,” says Lobben.
They will have to dive in, observe what is happening around the whales, and try to work out what the different sounds mean.
They need to find patterns in the sounds
Researchers now have a new tool to help them decipher whale language: artificial intelligence.
“It can help us compare whale sounds with human languages,” says Lobben.
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If whales could write, they would have a very long alphabet. Researchers at CETI have identified as many as 156 different whale sounds.
To understand these sounds, researchers need a large number of audio recordings.
“Artificial intelligence can then help us identify patterns in these sounds,” says Lobben.
Researchers can also play whale sounds underwater and observe how the whales react.
Learned the word 'boot'
The researchers aim to understand the language whales already use, but the whales themselves may also be able to help them along the way.
According to Lobben, Japanese researchers have shown that whales can learn new words.
“The researchers first trained the whale to associate four sounds with four different objects,” says Lobben.
A fin, a mask, a bucket, and a boot.
“And what happened? It learned to associate the sounds with the objects,” says Lobben.
And when a boot was placed next to a brush, the whale understood that the brush and a new sound were meant to form a new word, even though it had never been specifically trained to make that connection.
In other words, it was able to form new associations on its own.
Researchers now need to find out just how many words whales are capable of learning.
Smarter than humans?
Judging by the whale brain, whales may be every bit as intelligent as humans.
“The more folds and grooves a brain has, the more intelligent the species,” says Lobben.
The whale brain is like a giant walnut. It has lots of nooks and crannies that provide room for brain cells and fast connections.
Some researchers believe whales may be able to reflect and reason in ways similar to us, recall the past, and plan for the future.
"We have also found something called spindle cells in the whale brain," says Lobben.
Researchers call these the nervous system’s ‘express trains.’ The cells transmit large amounts of information quickly. There are lots of them in the beluga whale’s brain.
"Spindle cells are associated with intelligence, language, and love," she says.
A little more complicated in the ocean
"Do you think whales might be able to understand human language one day?"
"A language has to be learned," says Lobben.
She notes that other species have managed to do this. According to one study, a dog named Chaser learned more than a thousand words.
"The fact that whales live in the ocean makes things a little more complicated. Even so, belugas and other types of dolphins are very curious and playful. That's a good starting point for learning," the researcher says.
Noise and plastic
"What do you think whales and humans would talk about?"
"We can hope that they would tell us what they think about noise from ships and the amount of plastic in the ocean, but we are still a long way from understanding what whales talk about," says Lobben.
Hvaldimir most likely died after a stick became lodged in his throat and caused an infection.
"Do you think things could have turned out differently if we had understood him?"
"He was probably in pain for some time, and he may have needed to tell us about it," she says.
But beluga whales produce sounds through the blowhole on top of their heads, not with their vocal cords or throat.
"So if he wanted to tell us that something was wrong, he could have done so with his nose," says Lobben.
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Translated by Alette Bjordal Gjellesvik
Read the Norwegian version of this article on ung.forskning.no
References:
Pilley, J.W. & Reid, A.K. Border collie comprehends object names as verbal referents, Behavioural Processes, 2011. DOI: 10.1016/j.beproc.2010.11.007
Tsukasa et al. Preliminary Study of Object Labeling Using Sound Production in a Beluga, International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2012. DOI: 10.46867/ijcp.2012.25.03.04
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