for National Geographic News
New Yorkers have them. So do Georgians, Texans, Brits, and Australians.
Now primate researchers have discovered that Japanese macaques can acquire different accents based on where they livejust like humans.
The red-faced monkeys frequently utter what researchers have dubbed coo calls to maintain vocal contact with one another.
Recordings of these calls taken over an eight-year period show that macaques living hundreds of miles apart "speak" at different frequencies.
The finding, the first of its kind, will appear in the January 2006 edition of the German scientific journal Ethology.
"One of the characteristics of human language lies in its modifiability," said Nobuo Masataka, a professor of animal behavior at Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute, in an email to National Geographic News.
"Japanese monkey vocalizations share this characteristic with our language."
Researchers at the institute recorded the coo calls of two groups of macaques (Macaca fuscata), also called snow monkeys, that used to be part of the same population but have lived apart since 1956.
The first group consisted of 23 inhabitants of the southern Japanese island of Yakushima. The other group of 30 monkeys lives on Mount Ohira in central Japan.
The two groups are more than 434 miles (700 kilometers) apart and have had no contact with each other since their separation, researchers say.
Vocal recordings from both groups were taken intermittently between 1990 and 1998.
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