3-minute read
Elephants are really big—on communication. To maintain their highly complex social networks, the clever mammals use a distinct system of trumpets, roars, and infrasonic rumbles to communicate essential elephant info related to survival and strengthen bonds between family and herd members. According to biologist Joyce Poole, a world authority on elephant behavior, within their tightly knit communities, the emotionally intelligent animals even call each other by unique names.
But what happens to those vocalization instincts when an elephant’s herd is made up of humans? Amazingly, in the case of Koshik, a male Asian elephant born in captivity in South Korea, whose primary interactions from the age of five were with caregivers, the determined pachyderm was capable of learning to mimic a language other than ele-speak to connect to his social group. Exposed daily to the speech of trainers, Koshik learned to produce sounds imitating six Korean words that were easily identifiable by native speakers.
Elephant Ingenuity
And what did Koshik have to say for himself? His six-word vocabulary was limited to “hello,” “sit down,” “no,” “lie down,” and “good”—what you might call trainer-speak. What is most remarkable about Koshik learning to repeat what he heard in his daily environment was that he had to alter his vocal tract to do it. For a variety of reasons, unlike some species of birds, elephants and other mammals don’t have a natural ability to imitate human speech. One reason is that the part of their anatomy that produces sound is not shaped like ours. To mimic the words that Koshik heard from his trainers every day, he taught himself to place his trunk tip in his mouth and raise his lower jaw to manipulate the structure of his vocal organs.
As far as animal behaviorists know, talking elephants like Koshik are extremely rare. Although a few Asian elephants have been described as producing whistling sounds, Koshik’s is the only recorded case of an elephant reproducing human speech. Although we may never know exactly what compelled the big talker to learn how to mimic the words that he heard every day, biologists believe the chatty elephant may have been motivated by the urge to create social bonds with those closest to him—his human caregivers.
Hear Koshik speak Korean (“annyong”, which means “hello”, and “anja”, which means “sit down”). The first voice is the trainer and the second is Koshik.
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