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 ...

Humpback whale songs have statistical patterns in their structure that are remarkably similar to those seen in human language. While this doesn’t mean the songs convey complex meanings like our ...

Human languages display a pattern known as Zipf’s law. Now, researchers have found the same pattern in whale song. In all known human languages there is a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in ...