Parrots have different accents and squawk in dialects depending on which European city they live in, study suggests

Humans across the world have thousands of different accents, giving clues to where they were brought up.

Now, a new study suggests parrots also squawk in different dialects depending on which city they live in.

Researchers found that the calls of wild monk parakeets, a small type of parrot, vary between European cities.

The team from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour analysed birds in cities in Spain, Belgium, Italy and Greece.

The birds, which are originally from South America, now exist in huge numbers across Europe due to pets escaping and breeding.

They have an exceptionally flexible vocal repertoire and can imitate and learn new sounds throughout their lives.

The study’s lead author, doctoral student Stephen Tyndel, said: ‘Because they spread through Europe only recently, monk parakeets are the perfect test tube for studying how complex communication evolves in a species other than our own.

‘Just like humans, monk parakeets in Europe have unique ways of communicating based on where they live.’ The researchers recorded the birds in Athens, Barcelona, Bergamo, Brussels, Legnago, Madrid, Pavia, and Verona.

And they discovered that parrots did have different dialects in each city.

Fellow doctoral student Simeon Smeele said: ‘Parakeets in Brussels, for example, had contact calls that were particularly different from those of other cities.

The team from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour analysed birds in cities in Spain , Belgium, Italy and Greece (Stock image of parakeets) 

‘For the most part, dialects differed in the frequency modulation structure within each call, which is super difficult for humans to hear.’ Although the bird’s dialects varied from city to city, they remained the same in different parks within the same city.

The team suggested that parrot dialects separated early when birds ‘invaded’ European cities 50 years ago, but didn’t change significantly after that.

‘This suggests that dialects came about through a passive process – birds copying birds make small errors and therefore cities slowly become different from each other’, Mr Tyndal said.

‘Or they were different to begin with, and these differences were maintained over time.’ The findings were published in the journal Behavioural Ecology.