Chimpanzees have their own language -- and scientists just learned how they put "words" together

[Judi Lynn]

The discovery of a chimp group's 390-word "language" has profound implications for the evolution of human speech

By MATTHEW ROZSA
PUBLISHED MAY 22, 2022 7:30PM (EDT)



Three chimpanzees sitting in a group appear to have a meeting (Getty Images/curioustiger)

Few animals appear to be able to communicate with a range as complex and intricate as humans. Those language skills may exist in a limited capacity in our nearest evolutionary neighbors, the great apes, many of whom have been trained to communicate via sign language by human researchers. Yet while sign language is communicated physically, researchers did not believe that great apes possessed their own comparable, complex spoken language.

Until now, that is. A new study reveals that chimpanzees — or at least, a group of 46 chimpanzees at Taï National Park in the African country of Côte d'Ivoire — are capable of complex vocalizations far beyond what more pessimistic scientists thought was possible. Their "words" were not like human phonetic words, but a combination of chimpanzee sounds, which generally sound a bit like grunts and chirps to human ears. And the size of the chimp dictionary? Almost 400 words.

"Chimpanzees produced 390 unique vocal sequences," explained the scientists, who published their research in the journal Communications Biology. "Most vocal units emitted singly were also emitted in two-unit sequences (bigrams), which in turn were embedded into three-unit sequences (trigrams)."

For context, the average human 20-year-old English speaker knows an estimated 42,000 words, according to Science magazine.

The scientists suggest that the way the vocal sequences were arranged suggests they could come up with new words, too. "From a purely structural perspective, the capacity to organize single units into structured sequences offers a versatile system potentially suitable for expansive meaning generation," they write. "Further research must show to what extent these structural sequences signal predictable meanings."

More:
https://www.salon.com/2022/05/22/chimpanzees-have-their-own-language--and-scientists-just-learned-how-they-put-words-together/