At Shark Bay, Western Australia, Dr Vincent Janik is developing his work to see if mother dolphins and their calves use the distinctive signature calls. While he was reluctant to say the dolphins were using language, Dr Janik said his study showed dolphins had a clear and consistent vocabulary and could identify each another as individuals. They always use the same call.
Some people call it a name.
The results seem to offer hints about the development of human speech. The way the dolphins copy each other's sound signals is thought to have been an important step in the evolution of human language. Dr Janik studied bottlenose dolphins off the Scottish coast, recording 1,719 whistles with six hydrophones and a computer-based method for finding individual dolphins as they made calls while catching salmon. Obviously at some point they want to get together again. Each dolphin makes its own, distinctive whistle.