In a startling new discovery, research has shown that the speech of penguins follows some of the same rules and principles as human speech.There are two main laws of language that penguins have been found to adhere to. First, Zipf’s Law of Brevity, which dictates that the words we most frequently use, in almost any human language, are shorter and easy to say. Then there’s the Menzerath-Altmann Law, whereby longer words are composed of extra, but shorter, syllables. Language evolves slowly over many long years, but one pattern spans most human language: Information compression. This follows Zipf’s Law, as we tend to compress the most common words in order to convey information more efficiently. Everyday English examples of this are stop, walk, listen, eat, sleep, good and bad.
According to the scientists behind this new body of research, the similar patterns observed in penguin speech is the first time that this has been seen outside of primates. The research team from L’Equipe de Neuro-Ethologie Sensorielle of the University of Lyon/Saint-Etienne recorded almost 600 mating calls of 28 adult African penguins between 2016 and 2017, and through careful of analysis, they found that the “words” used most often were indeed the shortest. On top of this, the longer words were made up of shorter syllables, following the Menzerath-Altmann law.
