AILSA CHANG, HOST:
If you had to try to communicate with a sperm whale, you might try to (speaking slowly) talk really slowly.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FINDING NEMO")
ELLEN DEGENERES: (As Dory, speaking slowly) We need...
ALBERT BROOKS: (As Marlin) Dory?
DEGENERES: (As Dory, speaking slowly) ...To find...
BROOKS: (As Marlin) What are you doing?
DEGENERES: (As Dory, speaking slowly) ...His son.
BROOKS: (As Marlin) What are you doing?
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Of course, in the movie "Finding Nemo," Dory was trying to speak with a blue whale. Sperm whales actually make clicking sounds kind of like this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPERM WHALE CLICKS)
CHANG: (Laughter) So cute. Scientists now believe that those clicks have patterns that resemble how humans use vowels, just, you know, with a different sense of time.
GASPER BEGUS: We're, in a sense, a fast animal, and they're just very, very slow.
KELLY: That is Gasper Begus, linguistics lead at Project CETI. That is an initiative which has been working on decoding sperm whale vocabulary for years. Begus and his team took their recordings of sperm whales and they sped them up. At that point, the new waveforms actually started to look a lot like those of human speech.
BEGUS: And once you realize - you see all these patterns, all these beautiful patterns like vowels and diphthongs - you realize, well, we're not that different, you know? This Morse code, this alien system is not that alien.
CHANG: They published their findings in a new study out this week in Proceedings Of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Begus and his team have identified two distinct vowels so far.
KELLY: Here's the same whale that we heard before. By the way, her name is Pinchy. Begus says she's his favorite.
CHANG: But this time, Pinchy's vocalizations are sped up. See if you can hear the two different sounds.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPED-UP SPERM WHALE CLICKS)
CHANG: Begus says, not only can the two whale vowels be long or short, much like the way we extend or shorten vowels, they also can be tonal, like in Mandarin, which makes these whale sounds some of the most complex in the animal kingdom.
BEGUS: They really engage in conversation. When they - when we recorded the birth of a sperm whale, which was really a beautiful event, they were so chatty and loud and talking so much. So they really engage in conversation and exchange these very rich vocalizations.
KELLY: Even more incredible - the whales make their vowels with an anatomy similar to human vocal cords. But scientists believe the whales evolved their so-called phonic lips completely separately from humans.
CHANG: Of course, the complex vocalizations are just one part of why Begus says he's so fascinated with this species.
BEGUS: Sperm whales have the largest brain. They have super-complex societies. They have collaborative birth. They babysit each others' calf. They live very long. Grandmas are very important.
CHANG: Aww. We're still a long way away from knowing what the clicks mean, but Begus says the fact that they make these complex sounds shows that their communication is way more similar to ours than we once thought. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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