Y'all Tawk Funny, Doncha Know

All of our struggles for dialectal conformity (admit it, even you have tried to talk like the cool kids at times) have come from the fact that we learn language through both vertical and horizontal transmission (and no, I’m not talking about the way STDs are spread). We learn language both from our parents (vertical transmission) and our peers (horizontal transmission). We now suspect that orcas (also called killer whales) do too.


Photo by Olga Filatova.

Today I am revisiting my thoughts on dialects, learning languages, and orcas from an article I wrote in the early days of The Scorpion and the Frog. You can read the article in it's entirety here.