African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls

Personal 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 addressee, human names are not imitations of the sounds typically made by the named individual. Labeling objects or individuals without relying on imitation of the sounds made by that object or individual radically expands 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 present evidence that wild African elephants address one another with individually specific calls without imitation. We used machine learning to demonstrate that the receiver of a call could be predicted from the call's acoustic structure and found little evidence that calls addressed to a given receiver imitate the receiver's own calls. 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.