Signal abbreviation and compression in loud calls of the white-headed langur

Human language is intricately designed to enhance the effectiveness of communication. Zipf’s law of abbreviation and Menzerath’s law are linguistic principles, predicting that coding length is minimized for optimal coding efficiency. Zipf’s law posits that more frequently used linguistic elements or calls are of shorter duration, while Menzerath’s law argues that larger linguistic sequences are compressed with shorter constituent calls. However, the extent to which non-human primate vocalizations adhere to linguistic laws is uncertain. Here we applied these linguistic laws to the long-distance loud calls of adult male white-headed langurs (<i>Trachypithecus leucocephalus</i>), a highly social colobine primate. In this project, we provided the original data of this research and the code for analysis and plotting