African elephants address one another with individually specific 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 1,2, human names are not imitations
of the sounds typically made by the named individual 3. Labeling objects
or individuals without relying on imitation of the sounds made by the
referent 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, likely without relying on imitation of the
receiver. We used machine learning to demonstrate that the receiver of a
call could be predicted from the call’s acoustic structure, regardless of
how similar the call was to the receiver’s vocalizations. Moreover,
elephants differentially responded to playbacks of calls originally
addressed to them relative to calls addressed to a different individual.
Our findings offer the first evidence for individual addressing of
conspecifics in elephants. They further suggest that unlike other nonhuman
animals, elephants likely do not rely on imitation of the receiver’s calls
to address one another.