From our community:
A now 16-year-old killer whale named Wilkie has mimicked her French trainer by speaking a few simple words in English. She has been able to say “Hello,” “Goodbye,” “Amy” and can even blow raspberries. It is not perfect enunciation, but is astonishingly recognizable nonetheless.
Dr. Josep Call from the University of St Andrews stated, ‘In mammals it is very rare. Humans are obviously good at it… Interestingly the mammals that can do best are marine mammals.’
The sounds which emerge from her blowhole sound “like parrot-like squawks, shrill whistles or raspberries.” Most are clear enough to understand.
CBS News reports:
Seeking to measure orcas' ability to copy new sounds, Abramson and a team turned to Wikie, a captive killer whale at the Marineland Aquarium in Antibes, southern France.
Trained to perform tricks for Marineland visitors, Wikie was a good candidate as she had already learnt the gesture commanding her to "copy" what her trainer does.
As part of the trial, the killer whale was asked to mimic never-before-heard sounds made by other orcas with different dialects from different family groups.
Then, she was made to repeat human words.
Popular Science expands in more detail:
The purpose of teaching an animal some English words isn’t to make it speak our language. It’s more about understanding how an animal learns when confronted with something totally unfamiliar. We already know that orcas can learn orca sounds by mimicking each other. Now we’re interested in figuring out how an orca might learn a more foreign sound—like the word “Amy”—and what it can do with that new information. Can it associate the sound with a person? Can it use the sound to request Amy herself? It’s only by pushing these boundaries that scientists can begin to understand the extent of a killer whale’s intellectual capabilities.
In the study on Wilkie, which was published on Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the researchers were specifically telling the 14-year-old orca to copy sounds. Experts already knew killer whales could imitate noises, because that’s how they learn from each other. Now they needed to figure out whether orcas can extend that concept of “copying” to something unfamiliar—like a human voice. The answer was a resounding “YES.” Wilkie learned new words almost immediately, especially when the sounds were easy to produce. She picked up several of them on the first try.