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 known as Zipf's law.

Despite humans and whales being separated by millions of years of evolution, our vocalizations follow the same principle outlined in Zipf's law

Two new studies have found that whale song has structural similarities to human languages, especially when it comes to efficiency and brevity. It’s leading researchers to believe that evolutionary pressures might affect other complex communicators in similar ways.