African elephants address one another with individually specific calls

Abstract

SUMMARYPersonal names are a universal feature of human language, yet few analogs exist in other species. While dolphins and parrots address conspecifics by imitating the calls of the addressee1,2, human names are not imitations of the sounds typically made by the name’s owner3. Labeling objects or individuals without relying on imitation of the sounds made by that object or individual is key to the expressive power of language. Thus, if non-imitative name analogs were found in other species, this could have important implications for our understanding of language evolution. Here, we show that wild African elephants address one another with individually specific calls without any evidence of imitating the receiver’s vocalizations. A random forest model correctly predicted receiver identity from call structure better than expected by chance, regardless of whether the calls were more or less similar to the receiver’s calls than typical for that caller. Moreover, elephants differentially responded to playbacks of calls originally addressed to them relative to calls addressed to a different individual, indicating that they can determine from a call’s structure if it was addressed to them. Our findings offer the first evidence for a non-human species individually addressing conspecifics without imitating the receiver.