We're close to translating animal languages – what happens then?

The Guardian

2 days ago

Charles Darwin suggested that humans learned to speak by mimicking birdsong: our ancestors' first words may have been a kind of interspecies exchange. Perhaps it won't be long before we join the conversation once again.
The race to translate what animals are saying is heating up, with riches as well as a place in history at stake. The Jeremy Coller Foundation has promised $10m to whichever researchers can crack the code. This is a race fuelled by generative AI; large language models can sort through millions of recorded animal vocalisations to find their hidden grammars. Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like us, they learn through vocal imitation and, also like us, they communicate via complex arrangements of sound that appear to have structure and hierarchy.
Sperm whales communicate in codas – rapid sequences of clicks, each as brief as 1,000th of a second. Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) is using AI to analyse codas in order to reveal the mysteries of sperm whale speech. There is evidence the animals take turns, use specific clicks to refer to one another, and even have distinct dialects. Ceti has already isolated a click that may be a form of punctuation, and they hope to speak whaleish as soon as 2026.
The linguistic barrier between species is already looking porous. Last month, Google released DolphinGemma, an AI program to translate dolphins, trained on 40 years of data. In 2013, scientists using an AI algorithm to sort dolphin communication identified a new click in the animals' interactions with one another, which they recognised as a sound they had previously trained the pod to associate with sargassum seaweed – the first recorded instance of a word passing from one species into another's native vocabulary.
The prospect of speaking dolphin or whale is irresistible. And it seems that they are just as enthusiastic. In November last year, scientists in Alaska recorded an acoustic 'conversation' with a humpback whale called Twain, in which they exchanged a call-and-response form known as 'whup/throp' with the animal over a 20-minute period. In Florida, a dolphin named Zeus was found to have learned to mimic the vowel sounds, A, E, O, and U.
But in the excitement we should not ignore the fact that other species are already bearing eloquent witness to our impact on the natural world. A living planet is a loud one. Healthy coral reefs pop and crackle with life. But soundscapes can decay just as ecosystems can. Degraded reefs are hushed deserts. Since the 1960s, shipping and mining have raised background noise in the oceans by about three decibels a decade. Humpback whale song occupies the same low-frequency bandwidth as deep-sea dredging and drilling for the rare earths that are vital for electronic devices. Ironically, mining the minerals we need to communicate cancels out whales' voices.
Humpback whale songs are incredible vocal performances, sometimes lasting up to 24 hours. 'Song' is apt: they seem to include rhymed phrases, and their compositions travel the oceans with them, evolving as they go in a process called 'song revolutions', where a new cycle replaces the old. (Imagine if Nina Simone or the Beatles had erased their back catalogue with every new release.) They're crucial to migration and breeding seasons. But in today's louder soundscape, whale song is crowded out of its habitual bandwidth and even driven to silence – from up to 1.2 km away from commercial ships, humpback whales will cease singing rather than compete with the noise.
In interspecies translation, sound only takes us so far. Animals communicate via an array of visual, chemical, thermal and mechanical cues, inhabiting worlds of perception very different to ours. Can we really understand what sound means to echolocating animals, for whom sound waves can be translated visually?
The German ecologist Jakob von Uexküll called these impenetrable worlds umwelten. To truly translate animal language, we would need to step into that animal's umwelt – and then, what of us would be imprinted on her, or her on us? 'If a lion could talk,' writes Stephen Budiansky, revising Wittgenstein's famous aphorism in Philosophical Investigations, 'we probably could understand him. He just would not be a lion any more.' We should ask, then, how speaking with other beings might change us.
Talking to another species might be very like talking to alien life. It's no coincidence that Ceti echoes Nasa's Seti – Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – Institute. In fact, a Seti team recorded the whup/throp exchange, on the basis that learning to speak with whales may help us if we ever meet intelligent extraterrestrials. In Denis Villeneuve's movie Arrival, whale-like aliens communicate via a script in which the distinction between past, present and future times collapses. For Louise, the linguist who translates the script, learning Heptapod lifts her mind out of linear time and into a reality in which her own past and future are equally available.
The film mentions Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf's theory of linguistic determinism – the idea that our experience of reality is encoded in language – to explain this. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was dismissed in the mid-20th century, but linguists have since argued that there may be some truth to it. Pormpuraaw speakers in northern Australia refer to time moving from east to west, rather than forwards or backwards as in English, making time indivisible from the relationship between their body and the land.
Whale songs are born from an experience of time that is radically different to ours. Humpbacks can project their voices over miles of open water; their songs span the widest oceans. Imagine the swell of oceanic feeling on which such sounds are borne. Speaking whale would expand our sense of space and time into a planetary song. I imagine we'd think very differently about polluting the ocean soundscape so carelessly.
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Where it counts, we are perfectly able to understand what nature has to say; the problem is, we choose not to. As incredible as it would be to have a conversation with another species, we ought to listen better to what they are already telling us.
David Farrier is the author of Nature's Genius: Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet (Canongate).
Why Animals Talk by Arik Kershenbaum (Viking, £10.99)
Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Wiley-Blackwell, £24.95)
An Immense World by Ed Yong (Vintage, £12.99)