Do elephants have names for each other?

Published 9 October 2026 · Last reviewed 9 October 2026 · By the TuskWise team

Probably yes, at least for wild African savanna elephants. A 2024 study in Nature Ecology and Evolution found that elephants in Kenya address individual family members with low rumbles that contain receiver-specific, name-like information, and that elephants react more strongly when they hear a recorded call that was originally addressed to them. Unlike dolphins, elephants do not seem to copy the other animal's own call to do this, which makes it closer to how humans use arbitrary names.

The short answer

Elephants do not shout names the way people do, but the best evidence we have says wild African elephants use something that works like a name. When one elephant rumbles to a particular family member, the call carries acoustic features specific to that receiver, and the receiver responds more to it than to calls aimed at others. Only a handful of animals have shown anything similar, and elephants may be the first known non-human animal to do it without imitating the other animal's own sounds.

How researchers tested it

The key study is Pardo and colleagues (2024), published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The team, which included long term elephant researchers Joyce Poole, Cynthia Moss, Iain Douglas-Hamilton and George Wittemyer, recorded rumbles from wild female and young elephants in two Kenyan populations: Amboseli National Park and the Samburu and Buffalo Springs reserves. Because these elephants are known as individuals, the researchers could note who called and who the call was clearly meant for, for example a mother rumbling to a calf that had wandered off, or an elephant greeting a returning companion.

They then measured many acoustic features of each rumble and trained a machine learning model to predict the intended receiver from the sound alone. The model picked the right receiver far more often than chance would allow. Not every call contained a "name", and the accuracy was well short of perfect, but the receiver-specific signal was real and statistically robust. Calls aimed at the same receiver were also more similar to each other than calls aimed at different receivers, even when the same caller made them.

The elephants' own reaction

A statistical pattern in recordings is not proof that elephants understand it, so the team ran playback experiments. They played elephants a rumble that had originally been addressed to them, and on another occasion a rumble from the same caller addressed to a different elephant. Elephants responded more energetically to the calls meant for them: they approached the speaker faster, called back more often and responded sooner. That is roughly what you would expect if they recognized a call as "for me".

Why this is different from dolphins

Bottlenose dolphins are famous for signature whistles, and a dolphin can address another by copying that animal's whistle. Pardo and colleagues checked whether elephants do the same, and found that calls addressed to a receiver were not more similar to the receiver's own calls. In other words, elephant "names" appear to be arbitrary labels rather than imitations, which is closer to how human names work. That kind of labeling is thought to demand more abstract thinking, which fits what we know about elephant intelligence.

Can elephants learn sounds at all?

Using arbitrary names only works if animals can learn and adjust their calls, and elephants can. In a 2005 paper in Nature, Joyce Poole and colleagues described an orphaned African elephant in Kenya that imitated the sound of trucks on a nearby highway, and a captive African elephant that produced chirping sounds like those of Asian elephants it lived with. In 2012, Angela Stoeger and colleagues reported in Current Biology that Koshik, an Asian elephant at a zoo in South Korea, imitated several Korean words by putting his trunk in his mouth to shape the sound. Vocal learning is rare in mammals, and these studies show elephants have the ability that name-like calling would need.

Why rumbles are the right channel

Most elephant communication happens in rumbles, low frequency calls whose fundamental frequency can sit near or below the lower limit of human hearing. A review by Joseph Soltis in Zoo Biology (2010) describes how rumbles vary with an elephant's identity, age, emotional state and situation, and how they help separated family members keep in contact over long distances. With complex, fission-fusion societies in which families split up and reunite, being able to call one particular relative is useful. Learn more about family life in our elephant behavior guide and the African savanna elephant profile.

What we still do not know

• Which part of the call is the name. The study showed receiver-specific information exists but could not pinpoint exactly which sound features carry it.
• Other species. Only African savanna elephants were studied. Whether Asian elephants or African forest elephants do the same is untested.
• How names are learned. We do not know whether names are given by mothers, shared across a family, or change over a lifetime.
• Meaning in context. Name-like calls were found in greetings, contact calls and caregiving, but researchers do not claim elephants talk about absent individuals.

The bottom line

Elephants have not been shown to have names in the full human sense, but a careful field study shows they address specific individuals with distinct, learned-looking calls, and that those individuals recognize calls meant for them. Combined with evidence of vocal learning and their long social memory (see do elephants really never forget?), it is one more reason to see elephant families as rich, individual relationships worth protecting.