For anyone who has ever wished they could ‘speak’ elephant, enter our elephant translation tool: Hello in Elephant. A collaboration between the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust and ElephantVoices, Hello in Elephant invites users to join the elephant conversation. It translates simple human messages — using voice recognition, text, and emoji input — into the elephant language.

Hello in Elephant gives voice to a living, breathing language that has evolved over millennia. All the sounds in the tool are recorded from real wild elephants in Africa. No matter where you are in the world, Hello in Elephant allows you to better understand the elephant vernacular.

Preserving, sharing, and shining a spotlight on this endangered language is more important now than ever. Across Africa, elephant numbers continue to fall. In 2021, following decades of population decline driven by poaching, climate change, habitat loss, and human-wildlife conflict, the African forest elephant was reclassified as ‘Critically Endangered’ and the African savanna elephant as ‘Endangered,’ placing both on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

When a species is at risk of extinction, so is its language. Our hope is that Hello in Elephant will help people around the world appreciate the intricacies of elephant communication — and realise that they are not so different from us.

We invite you to explore Hello in Elephant and join the elephant conversation — after all, a language is meant to be spoken and shared. And the next time you hear an elephant, whether in the wild or on social media, you might just understand exactly what they are saying!