New Study Claims Penguins, Humans Share The Same Speech Patterns

There is much to say about penguins. To cite the obvious, these flightless birds are cute, cuddly and innocent-looking, save maybe for some fictional trio of these birds that know to handle themselves and of course, one of Batman's arch-nemesis.

But on a more serious note, a recent study is claiming that humans and penguins somewhat share the same speech patterns, and this the first time something like this has surfaced in another animal aside from primates.

What the researchers suggested came by way of two laws: Zipf's Law of Brevity, which states that the most frequent used words are the shortest, and the Menzerath-Altmann Law, or the instance where the duration decreases as the size of the linguistic construct increases.

The team based their hypothesis and studied 590 “ecstatic display songs” from 28 adult African penguins in Italian zoos. Through CNN, the paper described the songs to sound like a donkey's bray. Through this, they came to a conclusion that the display songs – which the penguins use for territorial defense, mating call and whatnot – contained three types of syllables, and that the shortest syllable was used the most stereotypically.

They also found out that the song's constituents have nothing to do with the size of the song. In other words, the longer the sentence, the shorter the syllables.

With humans and penguins share a similar trait in speech patterns through the two laws, co-author Livio Favaro told NBC News that it doesn't necessarily “mirror” our language. Instead, humans and penguins stand on a common ground when it comes to communication.