Whistled language
In early China, the technique of transcendental whistling, or xiao, was a kind of nonverbal language with affinities to the spiritual aspects of Daoist meditation.
[3] The development of xiao as a practice and art form can be traced through the works of the Western Zhou dynasty, and it was initially used to convey a sense of grief, or to invoke the spirits of dearly departed loved ones.
[5] While travelling through the territory of an ancient tribe on the southern Black Sea coast in 400 B.C.E, Xenophon wrote in the Anabasis that the Mossynoeci inhabitants could hear one another at great distances across the valleys.
[6] Aelian later wrote in De Natura Animalium of the Kinoprosipi people of North Africa, who made use of "acute whistling," who later historians believe were likely a tribe of the Anuak in South Sudan.
In 1982 in the Greek village of Antia on Euboea island, the entire population knew the local whistled speech called sfyria,[7] but only a few whistlers remain now.
[8] Whistled languages have naturally developed in response to the necessity for humans to communicate in conditions of relative isolation, with possible causes being distance, noise levels, and night, as well as specific activities, such as social information, shepherding, hunting, fishing, courtship, or shamanism.
They have been more recently found in dense forests like the Amazon where they may replace spoken dialogue in the villages while hunting or fishing to overcome the pressure of the acoustic environment.
[12] In Sochiapam, Oaxaca, and other places in Mexico, and reportedly in West and Southern Africa as well (specifically among the VhaVenda), whistled speech is men's language: although women may understand it, they do not use it.
Stories are told of farmers in Aas during World War II, or in La Gomera, who were able to hide evidence of such nefarious activities as milk-watering because they were warned in whistle-speech that the police were approaching.
Tonal languages are often stripped of articulation, leaving only suprasegmental features such as duration and tone, and when whistled retain the spoken melodic line.
[17] Instability in the boundary layer leads to perturbations that increase in size until a feedback path is established whereby specific frequencies of the resonance chamber are emphasized.
In a non-tonal language, segments may be differentiated as follows: Whistling techniques do not require the vibration of the vocal cords: they produce a shock effect of the compressed air stream inside the cavity of the mouth and/or of the hands.
[9] "Apart from the five vowel-phonemes [of Silbo Gomero]—and even these do not invariably have a fixed or steady pitch—all whistled speech-sound realizations are glides which are interpreted in terms of range, contour, and steepness.
Bilabial and labiodental techniques are common for short and medium distance discussions (in a market, in the noise of a room, or for hunting); whereas the tongue retroflexed, one or two fingers introduced in the mouth, a blow concentrated at the junction between two fingers or the lower lip pulled while breathing in air are techniques used to reach high levels of power for long distance speaking.
Whistling with a leaf or a flute is often related to courtship or poetic expression (reported in the Kickapoo language in Mexico[19] and in the Hmong[20] and Akha[21] cultures in Asia).
For example, in some tonal languages with few tones, whistled messages typically consist of stereotyped or otherwise standardized expressions, are elaborately descriptive, and often have to be repeated.
However, in heavily tonal languages such as Mazatec and Yoruba, a large amount of information is conveyed through pitch even when spoken, and therefore extensive conversations may be whistled.
However, while drums may be used by griots singing praise songs or for inter-village communication, and other instruments may be used on the radio for station identification jingles, for regular conversation at a distance whistled speech is used.
