Chimpanzees Have Accents

Chimpanzees have regional accents. Send this to whoever insists that animals only make noise. Scientists have just reported that young chimpanzees living in different parts of Africa do not sound the same, and that the distance between them widens as the animals grow up.

The team went through more than eleven thousand recorded calls from infants and juveniles in two separate places, one a rescue centre in Zambia, the other a national park in Tanzania. They sorted the sounds into grunts, whimpers and laughter, and then measured them. The youngest animals sounded broadly similar wherever they lived. The older ones did not. Each group had drifted towards its own particular way of grunting.

That drift is the interesting part, because chimpanzee calls were long assumed to be fixed at birth, written into the animal rather than picked up from the neighbours. If a young chimp is instead absorbing the sound of the group around it, the way a child soaks up the vowels of a street, then accent may be a much older habit than anybody was willing to claim.