Oct 21, 2011
This is whistle-speech of the Mazatecos. The video's in spanish, but the gist is that the region where they live is very mountainous, so sound doesn't carry well. However, since the language they speak is tonal (i.e., each word has a specific pitch), they can communicate some simple sentences just by whistling the tones.
My teacher showed this video in my Anthropological Linguistics class.