According to research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, sperm whales may be speaking to each other through a series of clicks that, while still seemingly alien to us on the surface, is a lot more like human speech than scientists expected once they dug into it.

The work comes from Project CETI, a group trying to decode whale communication using machine learning and large audio datasets. According to the team’s latest analysis, the clicks sperm whales make as they communicate with one another, known as codas, aren’t just random noise. They follow structured, rule-based patterns that resemble the very same ones we use to talk to one another.

After analyzing thousands of whale codas, the team thinks they behave much like vowels in human speech. There are distinct types of codas that are differentiated by a variety of variables like length, tone, and internal structure, which the scientists have labeled like human vowels – “a-codas” and “i-codas” and so on.

The Way Whales Communicate May Be Weirdly Similar to Humans

More importantly, they interact with each other in ways similar to phonology, the system we use to organize sounds into meaningful, digestible data exchanges.  This means that whales aren’t just making sounds for the sake of it. They’re shaping them and combining them in unique ways, possibly to modify their meaning depending on the context. While most animal sounds are considered generalized signals, sperm whales might be composing complex messages.

This tracks with how whales live. They form a tight-knit community made up of extended family units that rely on coordination to survive. They have a fairly complex societal system in which they hunt together, care for their young as a community rather than individually, and are often spotted gathered in close formation as they “talk” to each other through a series of clicks. You’d think they were engaged in a rigorous debate if you saw it, and that might be what’s happening.

The researchers were not sure what to call this behavior just yet, as labeling it as a language might be jumping the gun a little. To make a bold declaration like that would require proof that these sound structures carry specific, consistent meanings. All they have now is the vague outline of an architecture, but it’s not like the whales and handed them a copy of the whale version of Webster’s Dictionary.

If the whales were communicating with one another with a complex, nuanced form of language, then we humans are still at the toddler level of comprehension of that language. With more time, better data, and more advanced AI tools, the researchers think that decoding at least the basic “phrases” could happen within a matter of years.