Analysis of the acoustic signals of the bottlenose dolphins showed that they could have a well-developed spoken language.

Researchers from the Karadag natural reserve recorded a “conversation” between two dolphins using an underwater microphone developed by them. After that, the recorded audio signals were carefully analyzed. A system for analyzing the acoustic signals of dolphins was also developed, which allows you to distinguish the voices of various individuals.

The fact that the dolphins communicate with each other is not a secret. But what the conversation itself was, it was not possible to find out. True, experts understood that dolphins use different types of clicks and “whistles” to show their joy, boredom or loneliness. Now it turned out that in the "speech" of the dolphins there are separate words, and the "speech" itself, presumably, is much more complicated than previously thought.

By changing the volume and frequency of clicks, dolphins make up words , and from words - whole sentences. In many ways, these conversations are similar to human speech. The researchers worked with two bottlenose dolphins named Yasha and Yana. Their communication was constantly recorded, after which scientists tried to lay the entire conversation into component elements. As it turned out, the dolphins are able to carefully listen to each other. When one speaks, the second listens, trying not to interrupt, and vice versa.
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The head of the research, Vyacheslav Ryabov, says that the exchange of information among dolphins resembles a conversation between two people. “Each sound generated by one of the animals is different from the other sound generated by the interlocutor,” he says. The difference is in the spectrum and frequency of the pulsations. At the same time a number of combinations of sounds is not repeated. "We can assume that each ripple is a separate phoneme or a word from the language of dolphins."


Preferred Yasha and Yana position during a conversation

“An analysis of a series of“ conversations ”recorded during experiments shows that dolphins listen carefully to each other, without interrupting. This gives us a reason to think that animals understand the "speech" of the interlocutor, and they need to listen to everything before they begin to "speak" themselves, ”the scientist continues.

The brain of dolphins is no less complicated than the human brain. At the same time, dolphins have developed much longer than humans - their history goes back 25 million years.

The researchers found that Yasha and Yana can make sentences of five words or more. Unfortunately, the content of speech is still impossible to understand. Ryabov, in connection with this, says that now is the time to start communicating with dolphins, gradually improving our own communication skills with creatures different from us.

“People have to take the first step to establish relationships with the first intelligent inhabitants of our planet, creating devices that allow them to overcome barriers that stand in the way of understanding and using the language of dolphins,” he says. Previously, experts have found that dolphins use more than a thousand whistling signals. True, it remained unclear whether these mammals can directly talk to each other. That is, not to give simple signals to the whole flock that many animals can do, but to purposefully communicate with each other using an advanced communication system.


A group of recorded sounds generated by Yana Dolphin (bottom arrows) and Yasha (arrows pointing up) during one of the conversations

The work of Russian scientists in studying the way of communication of dolphins is not the first . Many specialists have studied dolphins, but no one yet has an understanding of the communications of these mammals. True, in 2007, Australian scientists were able to identify individual sounds as signals. A certain combination of such sounds meant “I'm here, where is everyone?”, “Hurry up,” “There is food here.”

In addition to sounds, dolphins can communicate with gestures using their fins.

Interestingly, the more complex the task that faces the dolphin, the more these animals communicate with each other. Perhaps, according to scientists, dolphins are discussing a solution to the problem they have encountered. For example, in one of the cases observed earlier by experts from Florida, USA, dolphins began to communicate tightly when trying to remove the cover from the canister.

Russian scientists claim that dolphins, like humans, build words from separate phonemes. True, if a person has a narrow enough spectrum band for communication, then dolphins have a much wider spectral range (40 times). Therefore, the speech of dolphins is more informative than that of humans. For the same unit of time, a dolphin can transmit a much larger amount of information to a dolphin interlocutor than a person - to a person. The loudness of the sound, the frequency of clicks, the presence of whistling acoustic signals, the frequency of the signal - all this matters for a dolphin.

Vyacheslav Ryabov and colleagues argue that the study conducted a thorough analysis of the sounds made by these animals. In the course of the analysis, the scientists studied both the spectrum, the duration of the sound, the number of individual sounds and phonemes, and the structure of the possible language of dolphins. Scientists emphasize that their work is theoretical.

However, the set of sounds that the bottlenose dolphins exchange with each other have much in common with a person’s speech. This testifies to the developed intelligence and consciousness in dolphins. Their language is most likely a highly developed speech, similar to human. Scientists emphasize the need to create systems that could help to study the structure of the language of dolphins. In addition to the bottlenose dolphins, the experts of the Karadag natural reserve studied the communication of the toothed whales (Odontoceti). It turned out that this species of mammals also has an advanced communication system using sounds. Perhaps, scientists say, this language is no less complex and developed than that of dolphins.

The scientific work "The study of the signals and the dolphins" was published in the journal "St. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics ”(SPbSPU Scientific and Technical Bulletin. Physics and Mathematics) (doi: 10.1016 / j.spjpm.2016.08.004).