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Penguins' vocal patterns follow the same principles as human linguistics, according to new research.
They follow two laws - that the most frequently used words tend to be the shortest and that longer words tend to have more but shorter syllables.
Experts say it is the first time it has been observed outside of primates and suggests the need for brevity and efficiency in animal vocalisations.
Such information compression is a general principle of human language.
The study, published in the Biology Letters journal, looked at the endangered African penguin and analysed 590 "display songs" from 28 of the birds in Italian zoos.
"Our results demonstrate that ecstatic display songs of the African penguin follow Zipf's Law of Brevity and the Menzerath-Altmann Law," said the study's authors.
"This is the first compelling evidence for conformity to linguistic laws in vocal sequences of a non-primate species.
"As predicted, we found that the duration of the syllables was inversely correlated with the frequency of occurrence."
The authors said their results suggested "for the first time that information compression can co-exist with other sources of selection in a non-primate species with a small and relatively fixed vocal system".
The study was led by the Equipe de Neuro-Ethologie Sensorielle of the University of Lyon/Saint-Etienne.
