Chimp chatter is a lot more like human language than previously thought

By combining different sounds, the apes unlock sophisticated communication abilities



A female wild chimpanzee (shown) uses vocal communication. The apes combine single sounds to create phrases with new meanings, much like in human language, a new study finds.

Liran Samuni/ Taï Chimpanzee Project


By Jake Buehler

May 9, 2025 at 2:00 pm

Grunts, barks, screams and pants ring through Taï National Park in Cȏte d’Ivoire. Chimpanzees there combine these different calls like linguistic Legos to relay complex meanings when communicating, researchers report May 9 in Science Advances.

Chimps can combine and flexibly rearrange pairs of sounds to convey different ideas or meanings, an ability that investigators have not documented in other nonhuman animals. This system may represent a key evolutionary transition between vocal communication strategies of other animals and the syntax rules that structure human languages.

“The difference between human language and how other animals communicate is really about how we combine sounds to form words, and how we combine words to form sentences,” says Cédric Girard-Buttoz, an evolutionary biologist at CNRS in Lyon, France.

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) were known to have a particularly complicated vocal repertoire, with about a dozen single sounds that they can combine into hundreds of sequences. But it was unclear if the apes used multiple approaches when combining sounds to make new meanings, like in human language.

In 2019 and 2020, Girard-Buttoz and his colleagues recorded 53 different adult chimpanzees living in the Taï forest. In all, the team analyzed over 4,300 sounds and described 16 different “bigrams” — short sequences of two sounds, like a grunt followed by a bark, or a panted hoo followed by a scream. The team then used statistical analyses to map those bigrams to behaviors to reveal some of the bigrams’ meanings.

More:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chimp-chatter-human-language