黑猩猩也有口音

黑猩猩也有地方口音。把这个故事分享给那个坚持认为动物只会发出噪音的人。科学家最近发表报告称，生活在非洲不同地区的幼年黑猩猩，叫声并不相同，而且随着年龄增长，这种差异会越来越明显。

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.

研究团队分析了来自两个不同地点、超过一万一千段的幼年和青年黑猩猩叫声录音，一处是赞比亚的一家救助中心，另一处是坦桑尼亚的一座国家公园。他们把这些声音分成咕哝声、呜咽声和笑声，并逐一进行测量。结果显示，最年幼的黑猩猩，不论生活在哪里，叫声都大体相似；而年长一些的黑猩猩则不然，每个群体都渐渐形成了自己独特的咕哝方式。

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.

这种变化正是有趣的地方，因为长期以来，人们一直以为黑猩猩的叫声是天生固定的，写在基因里，而不是从周围的同伴那里学来的。如果一只幼年黑猩猩其实是在吸收周围群体的声音，就像一个孩子吸收街头巷尾的口音一样，那么“口音”这种现象，或许比任何人愿意承认的都要古老得多。

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.