Scientists from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), and the University of Aberdeen, in the United Kingdom, have recently published a new study, arguing that human language and dolphin behavior have similar traits, as far as brevity goes. They set off in their line of reasoning from the law of brevity in human languages, which states that the most commonly used words tend to be the shorter. In dolphins, they say, the same type of law can be observed when at the surface – simpler movements to get the message across.

“Patterns of dolphin behavior at the surface obey the same law of brevity as human language, with both seeking out the simplest and most efficient codes,” Ramon Ferrer i Cancho, who is a UPC Department of Languages and IT Systems researcher, tells SINC. The expert is also the co-author of a new study detailing the finds, published in the latest issue of the journal Complexity. American philologist George K. Zipf was the first one to propose the law of brevity for human languages.

When people pick up writing or speaking publicly, they tend to employ a behavior known as “linguistic economy,” in which they use the most common and shortest words possible in the situation. The same behavior was noticed in dolphins that moved at the surface, when they tended to only make the most basic gestures they were capable of. The two researchers identified a couple of patterns, including the “tail slap” (made up of the units slap, tail and two), the “spy hop” (made up of the units stop, expose and head), and the “side flop” (which consists of the units leap and side).

Out of the 30 such patterns that the scientists observed, dolphins tended to perform the most basic ones, composed of a single action unit, most frequently, whereas the more complex ones, containing up to four actions, were extremely rare. They compare this behavior to the number of times the word “the” appears in Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, as opposed to the word “responsibility.”

“The results show that the simple and efficient behavior strategies of dolphins are similar to those used by humans with words, and are the same as those used, for example, when we reduce the size of a photographic or video image in order to save space,” Ferrer says.