Whalesong patterns follow a universal law of human language, new research finds

A humpback whale mother and calf on the New Caledonian breeding grounds. Mark Quintin

All known human languages display a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the second most frequent, three times as frequent as the third, and so on. This is known as Zipf’s law.

Researchers have hunted for evidence of this pattern in communication among other species, but until now no other examples have been found.