I used to think whale songs were just that—songs, like bird calls or wolf howls, basically the same across a species.
Turns out, orcas have dialects. Not metaphorical ones, not just regional variations like how people in Boston say “park the car”—actual linguistic systems passed down through generations, so distinct that researchers can literally identify which pod an orca belongs to just by listening to a few calls. Each matrilineal group, these tight family units led by grandmothers who can live past ninety, develops its own acoustic signature over decades, maybe centuries. The calls aren’t random either; they’re structured, repeated, taught deliberately from mother to calf in what looks disturbingly like pedagogy. Pods that share hunting grounds but belong to different lineages—say, the northern residents off British Columbia versus the southern residents in Puget Sound—speak mutually unintelligible dialects, even though they’re separated by maybe 150 kilometers of coastline, give or take. It’s like discovering that neighborhoods in the same city speak entirely different languages, except these neighborhoods have been doing it for roughly 10,000 years, possibly longer.
Here’s the thing: these aren’t simple identification badges. The calls serve multiple functions, layered and context-dependent in ways that honestly make primate communication look primitive by comparison.
Anyway, when a pod hunts salmon—Chinook, specifically, which are getting scarcer and that’s a whole other depressing story—they use what researchers call S1 calls, these repetitive high-frequency clicks that seem to coordinate who goes where. But when they’re just traveling, socializing, the calls shift to what’s cataloged as S3 or S7 variants, lower frequency, more modulated, almost conversational if you’re willing to anthromorphize a bit, which I definately am. The Southern Resident orcas, the ones everyone worries about because there are maybe seventy-three individuals left, have roughly seventeen distinct call types. The Northern Residents have more like twenty-two. But different families within the same community—they share some calls but not others, like cousins who grew up speaking the same language but picked up different slang.
Wait—maybe the weirdest part is what happens when pods meet strangers.
Orcas are intensely xenophobic, acoustically speaking. When researchers played recordings of unfamiliar dialects to resident pods, the whales went silent. Not cautious, not curious—silent, like someone shut off a radio. They avoided the area for hours afterward. Cultural boundaries in the ocean aren’t marked by borders or fences; they’re marked by sound, by who speaks your language and who doesn’t. Bioacoustician John Ford spent decades in the Pacific Northwest recording these calls, building what’s essentially a dictionary of orca dialects, and he found that pods can recognize family members they haven’t seen in years based solely on vocalizations. The acoustic memory is staggering—longer than elephants, possibly longer than any non-human species we’ve studied. I guess it makes sense when your world is opaque and three-dimensional, when vision barely works past thirty meters, and everything that matters—food, family, danger—has to be encoded in sound.
The Southern Residents are losing their dialect, though. Not forgetting it, exactly, but simplifying it.
As the pods shrink, as calves die before learning the full repertoire, as matriarchs disappear and take their knowledge with them, the calls are collapsing into a smaller set, less varied, less complex. Linguists call it language death when it happens to humans. I’m not sure what to call it when it happens to whales, but it feels like watching a library burn, except the library is alive and swimming and starving because we took all the salmon and filled the water with noise from cargo ships that drown out the very calls that hold their culture together. Researchers recorded southern pods in the 1970s and compared them to recordings from 2018—the difference is audible even to amateurs like me, this flattening, this loss of texture. The youngest whales are learning a simplified version of a language that used to be richer, more nuanced, and nobody taught them the old words because the grandmothers who knew them are dead.
