Of course they can! Consider this definition of speech taken from Dictionary.com: the faculty or power of speaking; oral communication; ability to express one’s thoughts and emotions by speech sounds and gesture. Elephants can do all of that!
Elephants, as do all highly social mammals, have a well-developed and complex system of communication that uses all their senses, with an added seismic ability to cause, detect, and send messages through vibrations in the ground.
They communicate acoustically (sound production and hearing), chemically (smell), visually (postures, gestures, displays) and tactilely (touch).
Elephants produce a wide range of sounds, from very low frequencies (rumbles – some in the infrasonic range and inaudible to humans) to higher frequencies (snorts, barks, roars, cries,…show more content… Could it be that the rumble sounds are similar to words? As one of the authors of the study, Lucy E. King, commented in an interview, “Interestingly, the acoustic analysis done by Joseph Soltis at his Disney laboratory showed that the difference between the ''bee alarm rumble'' and the ''human alarm rumble'' is the same as a vowel-change in human language, which can change the meaning of words (think of ''boo'' and ''bee''). Elephants use similar vowel-like changes in their rumbles to differentiate the type of threat they experience, and so give specific warnings to other elephants who can decipher the sounds.” Perhaps a linguist should be added to the next study!
It would be interesting to see lion alarm calls (and any other known alarm calls) compared to the Samburu and bee calls. And what about seismic readings? Couldn’t there be a seismic element to these
