Sperm Whales May Be Speaking In Vowels Too

Sperm whales may shape their clicks into something closer to speech than code. New research from UC Berkeley linguists and Project CETI suggests their calls contain vowel like structures with a human style complexity that challenges long held assumptions about animal communication. In a new acoustic and computational linguistics study in the journal Open Mind, published November 2, 2025, Gašper Beguš and colleagues in UC Berkeley’s Department of Linguistics and Project CETI analyzed more than a.