The fear of your mom sternly stating your full name in public is no longer a human-only experience.

A new study published in June of 2024 has revealed that elephants appear to use different calls for each member of their family. It is still hard to tell what exact part of the elephant’s rumblings is the name, but machine learning has been able to help with this. When the researchers played back the audio to the elephants, they perked up at the sound of their name. Regardless of what elephant names actually sound like, I’m sure Starbucks baristas will find a way to mess it up!

Very few animals have been known to use names. Bottlenose dolphins and green parrots create names by imitating a sound that the other animal uses a lot. For example, if you went around saying “Hi” a lot, your name would become Hi.

Elephants, on the other hand, are possibly the first nonhuman animal to use names based on arbitrary sounds. By having this ability, elephants are able to expand what they can talk about since they can name things that don’t have an easily imitable sound connected to them. This is one of the reasons humans were able to develop complex language.

Fun fact: Within linguistics, there is a field called onomastics which studies names. It focuses on many different facets such as origin, history, usage, and variation.

Elephants have always been my favorite animal, mostly because I go by the nickname Ella. They are very intelligent creatures, so I am glad they are getting the linguistic attention they deserve!

Read more:

Golembiewski, Kate. “Every Elephant Has Its Own Name, Study Suggests.” The New York Times. June 10, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/10/science/elephants-names-rumbles.html.

Pardo, Michael. (2021). “African elephants address one another by unique name-like calls, new study suggests.” PBS.org. June 15 2024. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/african-elephants-address-one-another-by-unique-name-like-calls-new-study-suggests.