Do elephants use names? How researchers tested the idea

Recognising a friend's voice tells you who is speaking. Hearing that friend call your name tells you something else: the message is meant for you. Researchers studying elephant calls wanted to know whether the animals could make that second distinction too.

What an elephant rumble can tell us

Elephants often communicate through rumbles, low-pitched sounds that carry clues to the caller's identity. A 2005 study by Joseph Soltis and colleagues found that rumbles from captive adult female African elephants varied with the caller and her emotional state. Could a call also identify the elephant being addressed?

Finding patterns in recorded calls

In a study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution in June 2024, Michael Pardo and colleagues analysed calls from wild African savannah elephants in Kenya. The research focused on groups of females and their offspring. Field observers noted who called and which elephant appeared to be the intended recipient, leaving out calls whose recipient was unclear.

A computer model used the sounds to predict which elephant a call was intended for. It did better with the original data than after the researchers randomly mixed up the sound measurements. But could the elephants themselves hear the difference?

The same voice, but a different recipient

The researchers compared responses from 17 elephants to two kinds of recording. One contained a call originally directed to the elephant being tested. The other contained a call originally directed to a different elephant.

For elephants that heard both types, each comparison used calls from the same elephant. The voice stayed the same while the intended recipient changed. This helped distinguish recognition of a familiar voice from recognition of a call meant for the listener.

Calls originally meant for the listening elephant prompted quicker approaches to the loudspeaker, earlier vocal replies and more vocalisations than calls directed to others. The researchers played complete calls, not isolated names. A July 2025 correction fixed five playback-data or scoring errors; some numerical estimates changed, but the statistical significance and overall findings did not.

Why researchers describe the calls as name-like

Bottlenose dolphins and some parrots can address companions by copying their distinctive calls. For elephants, the sound analysis suggests something different: a call can identify another elephant without simply imitating that animal's voice. That would be closer to how human names work. Saying a friend's name identifies them without copying the sound of their voice.

The study found stronger signs of name-like addressing in long-distance calls and when adults called to calves. Elephants live in families within wider social networks. Addressing a particular companion could help them maintain contact. That is a possible benefit, not proof of why the ability evolved.

These findings do not establish human-like language, a name in every call or one fixed name shared by all callers. Nor do they cover every elephant species or population.

Could we someday talk with elephants?

Researchers still need more recordings to isolate the possible names and investigate whether elephants also label food, water or places. Those questions remain open; the study did not translate elephant conversations.

Study co-author George Wittemyer sees a possible conservation use. Where elephants share land with people and eat their crops, he hopes it might someday be possible to warn the animals away from places where they could be killed. He described an ambition for future research, not an ability demonstrated by this experiment: using communication to help people and elephants share land more safely.