The whistled language of Greece: The story of Antia
The only whistled language in Greece (and one of the only two in Europe) is still used in Antia, a small village in the south of the island of Evia (Euboea), where the locals call it sfyria (from the Greek sfyrizo "to whistle").
Sfyria has a centuries-long history, and has always been used by the inhabitants of mountain-encircled Antia, especially the shepherds, who are believed to have used the whistled language to communicate with each other and with their families across enormous distances. The high-pitched sound combined with the mountainous terrain helped the sound travel even further.
However, the actual origin of this form of communication remains uncertain; according to one theory, it originates from Persian soldiers who had been guarding Greek prisoners in the Karystos area, and later fled into the highlands following their defeat in the Battle of Salamis in 480BC. These soldiers would then have developed a whistled language to avoid revealing their position and the content of their discussions, a practice subsequently picked up by the locals. Another theory suggests that the language was created by the inhabitants of Evia in the Middle Ages, as they moved inland to protect themselves against Sicilian and Venetian pirates. According to this theory, they invented this method to warn each other of further attacks and hide.
According to Dimitra Hengen, a Greek linguist who spoke to BBC Travel, sfyria is effectively a whistled version of spoken Greek, in which letters and syllables correspond to distinct tones and frequencies. Because whistled sound waves differ from speech, messages in sfyria can travel up to 4km across open valleys, roughly 10 times farther than shouting.
What is striking is that sfyria was only discovered by the rest of the world in 1969, when an aeroplane crashed in the mountains behind Antia. While the crew was searching for the missing pilot, they witnessed the shepherds exchange messages across the canyons in this way.
There are no more than six people, among the only 37 remaining inhabitants of Antia, who can still "speak" -or rather whistle- this language today. Although it has not yet been registered in the UNESCO heritage list, sfyria is considered to be older and more structured compared to many other whistled languages, while also being the most critically endangered. In fact, according to the Unesco Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, no other language in Europe – whistled or not – has fewer living speakers than sfyria.
