Díaz Reyes’s Spanish-language whistling students spend the first two or three months of the course learning to make a loud whistle with different pitches. Learning to whistle a language you already speak is relatively straightforward. To demonstrate, Meyer whistles English phrases such as “Nice to meet you,” and “Do you understand the whistle?” And the skill can be adapted to any language, even those that have no tradition of whistling. Whistlers can capture all of these distinctions by varying the pitch and articulation of their whistle, says Meyer. A t, for example, is richer in high frequencies than k, which gives the two sounds a different timbre, and there are also subtle differences that arise from movements of the tongue. Instead, it’s a more complex change in sound quality, or timbre, which is easily conveyed in a whistle.Ĭonsonants, too, can be whistled. A vowel such as a long e, for example, is formed higher in the mouth than a long o, giving it a higher sound. We distinguish one speech sound, or phoneme, from another by subtle differences in their sound frequency patterns. Whistled languages work because many of the key elements of speech can be mimicked in a whistle, says Meyer. On La Gomera, for example, a few traditional shepherds still whistle to one another across mountain valleys that could take hours to cross. That lets people communicate even when they cannot easily approach close enough to shout. Skilled whistlers can reach 120 decibels - louder than a car horn - and their whistles pack most of this power into a frequency range of 1 to 4 kHz, which is above the pitch of most ambient noise.Īs a result, whistled speech can be understood up to 10 times as far away as ordinary shouting can, Meyer and others have found. That’s because whistled speech carries much farther than ordinary speech or shouting, says Julien Meyer, a linguist and bioacoustician at CNRS, the French national research center, who explores the topic of whistled languages in the 2021 Annual Review of Linguistics.

Whistled languages are almost always developed by traditional cultures that live in rugged, mountainous terrain or in dense forest. Whistled speech has arisen in at least 80 languages around the world, especially in rugged, mountainous terrain or dense forest, where ordinary speech doesn’t carry far enough.Īdapted From J. Whistling may even provide a glimpse of one of the most dramatic leaps forward in human evolution: the origin of language itself. To linguists, such adaptations are more than just a curiosity: By studying whistled languages, they hope to learn more about how our brains extract meaning from the complex sound patterns of speech.

In at least 80 cultures worldwide, people have developed whistled versions of the local language when the circumstances call for it. The locals are communicating in Silbo, one of the last vestiges of a much more widespread use of whistled languages. “We can say, ‘And now I am making an interview with a Canadian guy.’” “Good whistlers can understand all the messages,” says David Díaz Reyes, an independent ethnomusicologist and whistled-language researcher and teacher who lives in the islands. Tourists visiting La Gomera and El Hierro in the Canary Islands can often hear locals communicating over long distances by whistling - not a tune, but the Spanish language.

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