We may not be fully conscious of it, but we humans often use shorthand in our communications, particularly speech, says Sheena Harvey.
We reduce familiar terms in length so we can get the message across quicker. For example, plane instead of airplane, TV for television, meds for medications, prep for preparation… the list goes on.
What is Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation?
This tendency to use as short a word as possible stems from what linguists call Brevity Law, or Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation as it’s also known. Language specialist George Kingsley Zipf formulated the law in the 1940s. Put simply, it says that the more frequently a word is used, the shorter that word tends to be.
His examples were the most common words in the English language – the, and, to, be, a, of, in – but it has since been shown that this assertion holds good for frequently used words in many other languages. Not only that, but where an original word is quite long but is commonly used, we tend to come up with a shorter version if we can.
Do animals use Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation?
But what about the rest of the animal kingdom? Do non-human species similarly go for short rather than long? Researchers at the University of Manchester, in collaboration with Chester Zoo, have found that birdsong follows the same pattern, with findings recently published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology.
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“We know that birds and humans share similarities in the genes and brain structures involved in learning to communicate,” says lead author Dr Tucker Gilman, “but this is the first time we’ve been able to detect a consistent pattern of Zipf’s Law across multiple bird species.”
Birds, of course, have much smaller repertoires in their communications than humans – we use thousands of words, whereas even the most vocal of birds will have only a few dozen distinct sounds. So to analyse birdsong accurately, the researchers employed a computational tool called ZLAvian.
Across more than 600 songs from seven different species in 11 bird populations the tool compared patterns and combined the data to enable the scientists to reach the conclusion that the most frequently used birdsong phrases were indeed shorter. This offers new insight into how animals communicate. It seems that across the animal kingdom the principle of ‘least effort brings greatest efficiency’ also applies.
“There’s still a lot more work to be done,” says Gilman, “but this is an exciting development.” The team hopes the study and the ZLAvian tool will pave the way to shedding new light on language similarities and differences between animal species.
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Main image: Getty
