BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
In the lush forests of Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire, a remarkable form of communication rings out. Barks, grunts, screams, and hoots echo through the trees—and, as it turns out, these aren’t just random noises. Chimpanzees are crafting meaningful messages by combining sounds in surprisingly sophisticated ways, according to new research published in Science Advances.
A team of scientists led by evolutionary biologist Cédric Girard-Buttoz recorded and analyzed over 4,300 vocalizations from 53 adult chimps. What they found is rewriting what we thought we knew about animal communication. Chimps, it turns out, aren’t just calling out about predators or food—they’re combining sounds like linguistic building blocks to convey layered and sometimes subtle meanings.
“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,” Girard-Buttoz explains. What makes this study so intriguing is that it suggests our primate cousins may be engaging in the very early stages of that same process.
The Lego blocks of language
Chimpanzees have long been known to produce a wide range of individual vocalizations. But Girard-Buttoz’s team identified 16 “bigrams” — short sequences of two sounds — and discovered that chimps can use at least four different methods to combine these into new meanings. This includes changing meaning based on sound order (think “hoo + grunt” versus “grunt + hoo”), or modifying a base sound by adding another, similar to how humans use suffixes and prefixes.
These combinations aren’t limited to urgent situations, like predator alarms. Instead, chimps use them across many daily activities: traveling, resting, merging social groups, and even nesting. One pair, the “hoo + pant,” seems to indicate a very specific action: making a nest in a tree—a safe move away from ground-based predators.
According to Girard-Buttoz, this kind of versatile communication suggests that chimpanzees may be signaling more than one thing at a time—a hallmark of human sentence structure.
A glimpse into language evolution
Simon Townsend, an evolutionary anthropologist from the University of Zurich not involved in the study, called the research “a super exciting advance.” Townsend recently studied bonobo vocalizations and found that they also use call combinations, though the chimpanzees’ system appears even more complex.
While chimp language isn’t quite at the level of nouns and verbs, this research shows that apes are far more linguistically gifted than previously believed. “These apes have the preliminary building blocks of complex language,” Girard-Buttoz says.
The next question? Whether chimps are stringing these bigrams into longer sequences with their own internal structure. Girard-Buttoz and his team are already on it—looking for signs of syntax in the canopy.
Source study: Science Advances— Versatile use of chimpanzee call combinations promotes meaning expansion
