If you live in a foreign country, it helps to learn the local lingo.
And this holds just as true for apes as it does for humans, scientists claim.
Chimpanzees that had lived for years in a Dutch safari park adopted a ‘Scottish accent’ after they moved to a new home in an Edinburgh Zoo alongside nine local chimps, the researchers argue.
The Dutch apes would make high pitched grunts when they saw apples.
The local Edinburgh chimps, by contrast, made a distinctive, lower-pitched grunt.
It's evidence, the scientists from the universities of York, Zurich and St Andrews said, that apes have ‘accents’ that vary from place to place – just like us.
It took several years for the expat apes to pick up the local dialect, because the two groups did not mix much when they were first introduced in 2010.
Dr Katie Slocombe, of the University of York said: ‘They weren't spending much quality time together and there weren't many friendships. So they didn’t have any motivation to change their calling.’
But after three years, the two groups buried their initial distrust of each other and got on famously.
In what is billed as a breakthrough in the study of language, the scientists said the Dutch apes adopted the same style of grunting as that of their hosts.
CHIMPANZEES CAN TELL RIGHT FROM WRONG
They are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, capable of using tools and solving problems much like their human cousins, but it appears chimpanzees also share our sense of morality too.
A new study of the apes reacting to an infant chimp being killed by another group has shown the animals have a strong sense of right and wrong.
The researchers found chimpanzees reacted to videos showing the violent scenes in a similar way to humans.
The researchers, whose study is published in the journal Human Nature, filmed 17 adult chimpanzees from two different zoos in Switzerland as they watched video clips.
The clips showed chimps either performing a neutral activity such as walking or cracking nuts, aggressive adult chimps, a small colobus monkey being hunted and killed by chimps and an infant chimpanzee being killed by its own kind.
The zoo animals looked up to four times longer at the infanticide scenes than any of the other video clips, responding not just to the infant screams but also to the scenes as a whole.
The findings suggest that chimpanzees can distinguish between aggression against infants compared to other violent forms of behaviour.
However, the researchers also found while the chimps watched the infanticide scenes for longer, there was only limited evidence they became agitated or reacted to them.
Dr Rudolf von Rohr said this perhaps suggest while chimpanzees can distinguish between right and wrong they will only respond emotionally to digressions within their own social group.
She said: 'We propose that chimpanzees as uninvolved bystanders may detect norm violations but may restrict emotional reactions to such situations to in-group contexts.'
By 2013, Dr Slocombe said: ‘The Dutch chimps had actually adopted the Edinburgh call for apples.’
She added: ‘If you tend to mimic someone's accent, they tend to get on better with you and they like you more. So it could be something similar to that, that we're seeing in the chimps.’
But the charming idea that there are regional variations in chimpanzee language has not been met with universal acceptance.
A rival band of researchers claim that the idea Scottish chimps have accents is making a monkey of us.
Scientists from the German Primate Centre in Göttingen, the University of Kent, and New York University (NYU) think the Dutch apes were simply getting excited at meeting some new friends.
James Higham, an assistant professor at NYU said the findings are ‘fundamentally a misrepresentation of the what the data actually show.’
He said in a paper published in Current Biology that the original authors did not factor in ‘arousal’ and that the Dutch chimps were simply more excited.
Julia Fischer, of the German Primate Centre added: ‘The Dutch chimpanzees may have given slightly different calls to the Edinburgh chimps, and then changed their calls, due simply to differences in their original feeding environments and diet, and then the subsequent changes in these following their move to Edinburgh.’
The authors add that when it comes to a Dutch chimp accent and a Scottish chimp accent the differences ‘are not terribly distinct’.
They say that in effect, one chimp grunt is much like another.
Brandon Wheeler, of the University of Kent said: ‘Closer inspection of the data reveals that both groups largely overlapped in the range of calls they were originally giving in response to apples, with only a few calls of the Dutch chimpanzees outside the range of the calls given by the Edinburgh chimpanzees.
‘There is some statistically significant but biologically weak change of the calls over time following the move of the Dutch chimpanzees to Edinburgh, but such social modulation is a well-known phenomenon in animal vocalizations that has been found in most primate calls-and even in the calls of goats.’
Professor Higham added: ‘This process bears little resemblance to chimpanzees 'vocally learning' a different call for the same object.’
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