Sperm Whale Language

Source Canadian researchers decoded whale communication revealing a complex language with thousands of distinct words. A collaborative project between Dalhousie University and the nonprofit Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) has produced the most detailed acoustic analysis of sperm whale communication ever assembled, and the findings published in 2025 are genuinely startling. Sperm whale click patterns — called codas — do not form a simple signaling system. They appear to operate as a structured combinatorial language, with individual units combining according to grammatical rules to produce a vocabulary of over 10,000 distinct communicative units. The analysis used machine learning models trained on over 4 billion individual click recordings captured by hydrophone arrays deployed across sperm whale feeding grounds in the Caribbean. The AI identified not just the coda patterns themselves, but context-dependent variations — the same coda sequence produced in different…