Do elephants have language ?

At several South African game reserves in the 1990s, rangers kept stumbling upon rhinoceros carcasses with gaping puncture wounds in the neck and shoulders. These rhinos were clearly not victims of poachers, because their horns were intact. It took the authorities some time to identify the perpetrators: young male elephants, who were killing and sometimes sexually assaulting the rhinos. In just one park, Pilanesberg, more than 40 rhinos died this way between 1992 and 1997.

A compelling hypothesis is that the rogue behaviour of the young bulls arose because they didn’t have the chance to learn elephant social norms. More evidence for this theory comes from the way the serial killing was brought to a halt. Some of the culprits were shot. But the most effective measure taken by authorities was the introduction of older bull elephants, from other parks. Almost immediately after their arrival, the rhinos stopped being harassed and violated.

Can elephants talk to one another? To try and assess this, we ought to reflect on behaviour that’s hard to explain without displaced reference and abstract communication. For example, in parts of eastern Africa, elephants are hunted by some communities (such as the Maasai), but not by others. Herds have learned both to distinguish between human languages, and to communicate these distinctions to other elephants. In other words, elephants who lack direct experiences with humans hunting them nonetheless know which groups to avoid.

The search space for nonhuman language use should rely on two general criteria. First, we need behavioural evidence for flexible, intelligent hypersociality that could make language development a viable investment for natural selection. Second, we need evidence of information exchange, using signals that have enough acoustic variation to make it physically possible that they could encode syntax.

Elephants use multiple channels for signalling to and with one another. One channel, generating vibrations in the ground, is used for long-distance transmission. Soft, low-frequency vibrations in the air, emanating from both the trunk and the gut, seem to be the main medium at close quarters. In addition, elephants have a range of standard trunk and head gestures that carry mutually understood signals. Finally, they clearly communicate information by touching one another in specific ways and places.

The existence of multiple means of communication is important, because syntax could be encoded in modulation across channels. That is, varying states in one channel (trunk vibrations) could introduce general but systematically related changes to the meanings of signals in another channel (say, trunk touches). In the human symbol system, for example, two identically shaped arrows can mean ‘Turn!’ and ‘Don’t turn!’ if they’re modulated by a second code system in which green means ‘Go!’ and red means ‘Stop!’

New machine-learning techniques, which can identify otherwise hidden patterns in data, could yield breakthroughs. But before we get this decoding mission off the ground, we have no empirical basis to reject the hypothesis that elephants use language. At this stage, a flat-out rejection of the possibility of elephant language is no less rash than naïve acceptance.
https://aeon.co/essays/if-elephants-arent-persons-yet-could-they-be-one-day