Human communication is pretty damn complex, so I’d say it’s extremely unlikely whales are going to have the same level of language.

Perhaps they could be at the level of some earlier hominids, but to me it seems more likely they’re going to be something different altogether. Human language evolved extremely quickly, so evolving it in the first place was likely a sort of an evolutionary threshold after which further development happened very rapidly. Whales on the other hand have been, from what we can tell, relatively unchanged for a long time.

Humans of course have hands and are therefore capable of making tools whales could never, and language development and technology appear to have been intertwined in human evolution. It could be that technology is what creates the evolutionary pressure necessary for developing complex language, and if so, then whales would not have had that evolutionary pressure.