How does a whistled language work? The case of Silbo Gomero

The sounds you just heard are not just whistles…they’re this island’s official language.

Silbo Gomero is a whistled language spoken on La Gomera, in the canary islands.

Yep, you heard that right, a whistled language.

The volcanic and mountainous topography of the island is such that centuries before mobile phones, people needed to communicate across long distances, and found out that where the voice couldn’t reach, a whistle could.

Here La Gomera, a whistle can travel for up to 3 or 4 kilometres, much further and with less effort than shouting.

Can you hear it? That's not a bird, that's Francisco, let’s go find him Yes, because Silbo Gomero is a UNESCO world heritage, and is spoken by around 20,000 people , almost the entirety of the island, with varying levels of fluency.

Whistled languages are a fascinating subject linguistically, but they’re also amazing because of what they reveal about our brain.

Bear with me, because this is really cool.

Silbo and Spanish are two versions of the same language, much like these subtitles you’re reading are English, in a written form.

But our brain doesn’t process the two in the same way.

A 2015 study conducted on whistled Turkish, showed that while spoken language has always been seen as a left brain activity, whistled languages engaged both parts of the brain simultaneously.

The speed, frequency, pitch and melody of whistling are so complex that we need both hemispheres of the brain to understand them.

What this means, is that language is not a left-brain activity per se, it just depends on its physical structure.

Whistled languages blur the lines between speech and music, they teach us astounding things about the human body and about our ability to adapt to even the most challenging places.

But of the 80 languages whistled in the world today, all of them are endangered.

That’s why islanders made the language mandatory in La Gomera’s schools… can you imagine what a whistling class looks like?

Silbo Gomero isn’t some made up language, it’s a transposition from word to whistle of the local language, Castilian Spanish.

Let me show you what this means.

The intonation of speech can easily be imitated by whistle, so if you say buenos dias in Spanish, it’s going to sound like this, in Silbo.

Vowels and consonants on the other hand are translated into cues like rising and falling pitches, and their length.

This is what the vowel A sounds like, versus the vowel E.

This means that Silbo can reproduce any other language, like French or English for example.

Can you guess what he's saying?

(In French) Goodmorning, how are you?

The revitalisation movement has succeeded in bringing it into schools, is there a future for silbo?

There may be no practical use, for it. Gomeros have phones now, with coverage all over the island, and as technology advanced, the need for Silbo decreased.

But does a language need to be useful, to live on?

Isn’t beauty enough?