MOSCOW: Dolphins may have a spoken language and a Russian researcher claims to have recorded the first- ever conversation between two dolphins.
Two adult Black Sea bottlenose dolphins, named Yasha and Yana, did not interrupt each other during an interaction taped by scientists and may have formed words and sentences with a series of pulses, Vyacheslav Ryabov says in a new paper.
“Essentially, this exchange resembles a conversation between two people,” Ryabov was quoted as saying by CNN.
Joshua Smith, a research fellow at Murdoch University Cetacean Research Unit in Australia, says there will need to be more research before scientists can be sure whether dolphins are chatting.
“I think it’s very early days to be drawing conclusions that the dolphins are using signals in a kind of language context, similar to humans,” he told the network.
There are two different types of noises dolphins use for communication, whistles and clicks, also known as pulses.
Using new recording techniques, Ryabov separated the individual “non coherent pulses” the two dolphins made and theorised each pulse was a word in the dolphins’ language, while a collection of pulses is a sentence.
“As this language exhibits all the design features present in the human spoken language, this indicates a high level of intelligence and consciousness in dolphins,” he said in the paper, which was published in the St. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics last month. (AGENCIES)
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