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

Humpback whales learn their haunting melodies in much the same way humans learn words For all the world’s linguistic diversity, human languages still obey some universal patterns. These run even deeper than grammar and syntax;