A recent study has revealed that wild chimpanzees use vocal combinations with remarkable complexity, analogous to fundamental principles of human language. This discovery challenges the long-held belief that only humans can create new meanings by structurally combining sounds and offers fresh insight into the evolutionary origins of language.

In humans, language is built on the ability to combine sounds into words, and words into sentences, according to syntactic rules that determine meaning. Elements such as composition (e.g., “great ape”) and idiomatic expressions (“go ape”) highlight the richness of this structure. A central question in science is understanding where this unique ability comes from. To explore this, researchers often compare the vocal communication of other animals—especially primates—with that of humans.

Unlike humans, most other primates typically rely on individual calls, known as call types. While some species combine calls, these combinations are usually limited and primarily serve to warn about predators. This has led many to believe that primate communication is too restricted to be a precursor to the complex, open-ended combinatory system of human language.

However, this view may underestimate the communicative abilities of our closest living relatives. Researchers from the Max Planck Institutes in Leipzig and from neuroscience centers in Lyon recorded thousands of vocalizations from three groups of wild chimpanzees in Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire. They examined how the meanings of 12 different calls changed when combined into two-call sequences. The ability to create new or compound meanings by joining calls is a hallmark of human language, making it crucial to explore whether similar capacities exist in chimpanzees and bonobos.

Chimpanzees vocalising human like
The researchers recorded thousands of vocalisations from three groups of wild chimpanzees in the Taï National Park in Ivory Coast. Credit: Liran Samuni / Taï Chimpanzee Project

The study revealed four ways in which chimpanzees altered meaning by combining individual calls into 16 different two-call combinations, closely mirroring core linguistic principles. These included compositional combinations that added or clarified meaning (e.g., A = feeding, B = resting, AB = feeding + resting), as well as idiomatic, non-compositional combinations that created entirely new meanings (e.g., A = resting, B = affiliation, AB = nesting).

Importantly, unlike previous studies where call combinations occurred in restricted contexts like predator encounters, these chimpanzees used a versatile array of call combinations across a wide range of social and environmental situations. This indicates a far more generative vocal system than previously recognized in the animal kingdom.

Our findings suggest a highly generative vocal communication system, unprecedented in the animal world, says Cédric Girard-Buttoz, the study’s lead author. This echoes recent discoveries in bonobos and points to the possibility that complex combinatorial abilities were already present in the common ancestor of humans and great apes.

The researchers conclude that we may need to reconsider long-standing assumptions about the communicative limitations of non-human primates. Either something unique emerged in the communication systems of hominids, or we have consistently underestimated the complexity of animal communication—a question that demands further investigation.

SOURCES

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Cédric Girard-Buttoz et al.,Versatile use of chimpanzee call combinations promotes meaning expansion. Sci. Adv. 11, eadq2879(2025). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adq2879

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