A new study suggests that chimpanzees have developed the shrewd ability to take on the accents of new social groups they mix with, and they do this by altering their call grunts in the exact accent of their new friends or environments.
According to Katie Slocombe of the University of York, “Our study shows that chimpanzee referential food calls are not fixed in their structure and that, when exposed to a new social group, chimpanzees can change their calls to sound more like their group mates.”
This indicates that it is not only humans that have the capability to modify vocalizations or mimic the accents of other cultures until they speak like them, chimps too have developed the trait. Chimpanzees have a way of grunting to signify the call to particular kinds of foods – and what’s more, other chimps in the pack know exactly what each grunt means in terms of the foods available to the caller.
Seeing this, researchers studied how the call grunt for “apple” changed over a three-year period when a number of chimp groups were merged at the zoo in Edinburgh. The scientists found that although the high-pitched call of a group differed from the low-pitched call of another group, they were soon able to call or grunt in exactly the same way when they got to know one another much better.
“We think it’s quite easy to hear how the two groups called in different ways for apples in 2010, and how by 2013 the Dutch individuals changed their grunts to sound more like Edinburgh individuals,” said Stuart Watson, also from the University of York.
Since scientists believe that the generational gap between humans and chimpanzees dated to between five and seven million years, it is believed that the most recent common ancestor to both humans and chimps shared a building block of language.
According Simon Townsend of the University of Zurich, “It would be really exciting to try and find out why chimpanzees are motivated to sound more similar to their group mates,” he said as a member of the study team. “Is it so that they can be better understood? Or is it just to sound more similar to their friends?”