Relocated Chimps May Have Adopted Local Dialect

Headlines suggest Dutch chimpanzees have learned to grunt with a Scottish accent. But the findings don’t quite back that out, and exactly what has happened may not be quite so simplistic.

Christian Science Monitor reported on the experiment at Edinburgh Zoo in the United Kingdom. There a group of chimpanzees raised in the Netherlands moved in with a locally-raised group in 2010.

To start with, the two groups of chimps used differing grunts in relation to apples: a high-pitched grunt by those from the Netherlands and a low-pitched grunt by those from Edinburgh.

Previous research indicated this difference wasn’t just a case of having a differing vocabulary or “accent” but rather that the differing pitch was related to attitudes to the food. The Netherlands chimps like apples, while the Edinburgh chimps do not.

By 2013, when the two sets of chimps had socially integrated, few if any of the chimps had changed their food preferences. However, a study published in Current Biology says the chimps that came from the Netherlands had adopted the “local” low-pitched grunt to refer to apples, even while continuing to like them.

Previous studies had showed chimpanzee language changed in response to social learning. However, the authors says this is the first evidence of chimpanzees changing a specific “word” (or at least the way they make the sound relating to a specific meaning) as a result of a change in their peer group.

One thing the research didn’t establish, however, is whether the “native” chimpanzees now understand that the newcomers are indeed referring to apples when they deliver the grunt in question.

[Image credit: Matthew Hoelscher via Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic licence.]