Is Morse Code a Language?

Encyclopaedia Britannica defines a language as "a system of communication that uses conventional symbols, whether spoken, signed, or written", one that "allows people to express themselves as members of a social group and participants in its culture". Morse code does not fit, because its symbols stand for letters, not for meanings.

The standard says as much. ITU-R M.1677-1 defines International Morse as a list of written characters and the Morse signal for each: the letters, the figures and the punctuation marks. Nothing in it says what any word means. For how the dots, dashes and gaps themselves work, see what is Morse code.

You can see this by sending two languages through the same table. The English "what" and the French "quoi" use the same International codes for their letters, and neither code knows which language it is carrying:

• WHAT (English)

  .-- .... .- -33 units · 1.98 s

• QUOI (French)

  --.- ..- --- ..43 units · 2.58 s

At 20 words per minute, WHAT takes 1.98 seconds and QUOI 2.58. German uses the same table too, with extra codes for its umlauts, such as Ä (.-.-) and Ö (---.), which the accented letters page lists with sound. Morse is closer to handwriting than to a language: another way to write down words that already exist.

It can be spoken. Once radio turned the code into tones, operators started to voice it: "dit" for a dot, "dah" for a dash and "di" for a dot inside a letter, so Q (--.-) is "dah-dah-di-dah".

A US Navy sailor who set the record on the Navy's Morse course put it this way in 2016: "It's a language. If you have a knack for languages, (Morse code) is going to be easier to pick up." That describes how it feels to learn, not what it is.

Operators also share a shorthand on top of the code: Q codes and abbreviations such as 73 for "best regards". That shorthand is jargon, still spelled out letter by letter. The Morse code abbreviations reference lists them, and the Q-code quiz drills them.

For Latin letters, numbers and punctuation, yes. The ITU publishes a single International Morse code, Recommendation M.1677-1, with one signal for each of those characters.

For everything else, no. Even English had two codes: American (Railroad) Morse, the code of the first telegraph lines, puts spaces inside C, O and R and sends L as one long dash. Here is the same message in both:

The American Morse code guide covers the differences. Scripts other than Latin have national tables of their own, which is where "universal" stops.

No. The dots and dashes are shared, but each table assigns them to its own letters. These four signals, read in the eight tables the site's translator uses:

• di-dah

  .-5 units · 0.30 s

• dah-di-di-dit

  -...9 units · 0.54 s

• di-di-di-dah

  ...-9 units · 0.54 s

• dah-dah-dah-dah

  ----15 units · 0.90 s

In the International table, ---- reads as CH, one of the codes Friedrich Gerke added for German in 1848. The translator decodes it but sends a typed "ch" as C and H.

Some tables borrow from the Latin code on purpose. Greek letters mostly take the code of the Latin letter that looks or sounds like them, so Α is the same as A, and Β takes B's code even though it sounds like V. Russian Л takes L's code, .-...

When Wabun and International Morse share one message, the prosign DO (-..---) announces Wabun and SN (...-.) marks the return to International code. Wabun has its own guide: Japanese Morse code. Chinese works differently again: each character has a four-digit number in the Chinese telegraph code, from 0000 to 9999, and those digits are what gets sent.

Paste .- -... into the Morse code translator, set it to Morse to text, then switch the code table. International reads AB, Russian АБ, Greek ΑΒ and Japanese イハ: same signal, different letters.

No. The point of a cipher is that only someone with the key can read it. Morse hides nothing: the ITU publishes the table, and anyone with a chart can read a message. For codes that are meant to be secret, try the pigpen cipher or the other secret codes. To hear any message in International Morse, type it into the Morse code translator.