Do penguins’ vocal sequences conform to linguistic laws?

“I am a great being. Every place is mine."

The words “belong” to an African penguin. Experts have called these penguin-like words "Ecstatic display song". 

Research has revealed that their voices are very close to human speech - similar to linguistic patterns.

Author of the book Why Penguins Communicate: The Evolution of Visual and Vocal Signs  F.Stephen Dobson suggested using computer software to manipulate penguins' calls, as well as measuring their responses and identifying which parts of the vocal sequence were important. He said this could be done by changing the frequency or decibel level.

A team of European scientists studied 590 vocalizations from 28 adult African penguins in Italian zoos and noticed parallels between the penguins' song and two laws that apply across a broad swath of human language. The discovery is the first time these traits have been observed in a non-primate species.

The researchers found that, as outlined in Zipf's law of abbreviation, vocal sounds that penguins use the most tend to be shorter, similar to conjunctions such as "and" or "so" in human speech. Penguin "chatter" also adheres to the Menzerath-Altmann law, which states that the size of a linguistic construct is inversely proportional to its constituent part. Essentially, this means longer words are typically made up of sequences of short syllables.

"We found the same thing in the songs of the African penguin, where songs containing many acoustic elements are made of acoustic elements of shorter duration,"  Livio Favaro, a researcher in the department of life sciences and systems biology at the University of Turin in Italy and a co-author of the study said.

According to “EuroNews”, experts believe this achievement will lead to further research.

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