Before the smartphone or even Morse code, some rural peoples “spoke” long distance by whistling. Linguists are racing to study the dying languages
One of the clearest, most extensive explanations of whistled languages around the world that I’ve ever read, in Scientific American by Julien Meyer. Excerpt:
The term “whistled language” is somewhat of a misnomer. Whistled speech, in fact, is not a separate language or dialect from a native tongue but rather an extension of it. Instead of using the voice to speak the Greek words Boró na ého omeléta? (“Can I have scrambled eggs?”), those same words are articulated as whistles. The sounds of the words just undergo a profound shift; they are generated not by the vibrations of the vocal cords but by a compressed stream of air from the mouth that swirls in turbulent vortices at the edge of the lips. Just as in ordinary speech, the whistler’s tongue and jaw move to form different words, but the range of movement is more constrained. All that changes is the pitch of the whistle; in contrast, when people speak, the timbre (what distinguishes one sound from another apart from pitch and loudness) may change, too.
In the end, the whistled words conveyed in the village of Antia are still Greek. Linguists sometimes liken a whistle to a whisper, in that both are alternative ways of speaking the same language without using the vibration of the vocal cords. [...]
Our inquiry so far has managed to locate about 70 populations who use whistled speech, most hailing from isolated mountainous or densely vegetated locations. That number is just a fraction of the world’s 7,000 languages, but it far exceeds the previously recorded tally. [...]
I was curious about how readily a person can learn some of the rudiments of whistled speech. Traditionally, the skill is taught shortly after a child learns to talk, but we decided to investigate the initial steps of whistled-speech learning in adults. I asked 40 university French- and Spanish-speaking students to listen to Silbo Gomero. We found that the students readily distinguished an obvious component of any Spanish whistled word—the vowels “a,” “e,” “i” or “o” (“u” is whistled as “o” in Silbo Gomero)—and that the Spanish students were a little more accurate than the French ones. Both groups of students categorized correctly the vowels far above chance, though not as well as a trained Silbo speaker.
Read the whole thing.
This description of whistling as like whispering made me wonder if you could also whistle English. I did seem to have intuitions about producing *something*, but I can’t vouch for its comprehensibility to other speakers. Please feel free to try it yourself and report back.
