So before we get started I think I should clear up a few things about what a whistled language is and isn't Whistled languages are neither basic pidgins like those used by hearers and animal trainers nor are they languages which develop independently of the spoken word. A whistled language is simply the use of whistling to emulate the speech of a language enabling the said speaker to communicate effectively anything they can in their normal language But over far greater distances than screaming and at way less vocal strain. I mean screaming bloody hurts more than a minute and it's still only intelligible for less than a mile But under the right conditions a whistle is intelligible for five miles and sustainable too, so where are all the whistled languages? Well, this is a simple map of the Earth with a pin in every instance of a whistle language I found, as you can see most of the pins are in clusters primarily in Mexico, West Africa and Papua Oh and for anyone with an interest in linguistics already that one in the Amazon is of course the one and only Pirahã You may also notice as a common trait of most of these pins They're either in the jungle, the mountains or both. Now unfortunately, the genesis of a whistle language has never been recorded or even received too much study But it appears whistled languages have developed as a response to relative isolation to help people communicate while hunting and shepherding or just helping you talk to you mate on the next mountain without him to climb down yours and up theirs. So mechanically speaking there are basically two types of whistled language and this is decided by whether thelanguage being whistled is tonal or not, and to be clear, non-tonal languages can absolutely be whistled, they're just a bit more complicated So in general when becoming whistle tonal languages are stripped of their articulation leaving only tone, length and to a lesser extent stress. Now obviously how well this works depends on the language If for example you took Examplish from my how to make a language videos and applied it to this You would get an entirely useless whistling language since there's no length I've never defined stress and the tone applies over the entire highly synthetic words for example the word for 'was a dog' would *whistles* And loved would be *whistles* Entirely identical since they're both two syllable words with a falling tone and it's not like I went out of my way to find this example, there are literally only three root words outside of pronouns Far better examples would be languages like say Hmong, with it's isolating structure making almost all words one syllable and these are simple syllables too without clusters in the onset and only nasals in the coda. What it does have is seven to eight different tones So ingrained within the language there's a tradition of young lovers communicating covertly on mouth harps. And of course Farmers and hunters chatting across great distances in whistle, of course as most people who make languages agree Isolating tonal languages just aren't as sexy as polysynthetic ones with English phonology plus tɬ. So how do they work? In non tonal languages more articulatory features of the speech retained, that's the stuff you doing with your tongue and your mouth Variations in timbre imparted by movements of the tongue and soft palate transform into pitch variations and some constants and spoken speech can be pronounced while whistling to change the whistle sound and that's all very well and good to say but it doesn't really help explain things So let me introduce you to Silbo Gomero, a whistled version of Spanish used by inhabitants of La Gomera One of Spain's Canary Islands. It's probably the best studied whistled language of the world, as opposed to all the whistled languages of other worlds So first I'll go over the vowels. There are five vowels in Spanish, a standard 5 vowel system Now here are the spectograms of a person pronouncing them and here is the same person whistling the vowels So first things first, /o/ and /u/ look very similar and in all analyses of el Silbo I've seen /o/ and /u/ have the same whistle sound. You can probably also see that whilst the spectrograms are very different the whistles are clearly mimicking something in the spoken sound This thing is called the f2 value and in general it would seem the f2 pattern and only the f2 pattern are transposed into el Silbo… in all honesty, there is a lot more complicated stuff going on here but I scarcely understand most of it and honestly you don't want to know so I'll stick the source in the description In any case if you want to make a whistled language like this just get some spectrograms, identify the f2 patterns and turn it into the pitches of whistles… easy… Next what exactly is the difference between a whistled vowel and a whistled consonant? I mean there are both whistles, right? So in terms of amplitude or basically just loudness, vowels correspond to peaks and consonants to dips or just straight-up silences, vowels are also in a quasi-steady-state Which is science for, basically just a constant sound with little enough variation as you whistle that it's unnoticeable, whilst consonants are rapid movements kind of like how the consonant /k/ is a rapid movement in the mouth but /e/ is constant There is also deviation in the tonal space, as consonant sounds are always higher or lower frequency bands, that is they're higher or lower pitch than vowel sounds, as for consonants themselves, there have been multiple analyses of them with the one being taught in schools - at least as of 2005 - being a somewhat oversimplification, but I'll start there. So obviously there's no International Phonetic Alphabet for whistles But el Silbo, at least it has a writing system So there are the letters for the four vowels, a, e, i, o and four letters for the consonants (I mean technically one of them's a digraph that's two letters for one sound but you get the idea) the consonants themselves can be split up two ways, whether thay're accute with a rising transition or grave with a falling transition and Interrupted consonants which are… well, interrupted, versus the continuous ones within el Silbo The interrupted consonants tend to be the unvoiced ones and continuous ones tend to be voiced, and this mainly because Spanish's stops /b/, /d/, /ɡ/ pronounced as approximants /β/, /ð/, /ɣ/ with in most environments Anyway, continuous acute is represented with a y and makes the sound (transcriptions on screen) Interrupted acute is represented with a ch and makes the sounds (transcriptions on screen) Continuous grave is represented with a g and makes the sounds (transcriptions on screen) Interrupted grave is represented with a k and make the sounds (transcriptions on screen) and so you get whistle transcriptions like this So here's the part where I'm supposed to do a spoken sample So I get to bring up just tell friggin long I spent trying to learn to whistle like this I mean, I spent the majority of my research time with one finger in my mouth Just trying to whistle like it I took time off to practice somehow my dad learned to whistle with his hands halfway through and I still can't do it. I mean Come on My lips still hurt from trying too long… actually, that's a lie My lips still hurted from trying too long when I wrote this bit of the script but whatever er, so anyway, I guess you get my discount no hands whistling also I have neither samples from speakers nor IPA transcription nor even spectograms of these particular samples So I'm almost certainly getting it wrong and it's more just to get the idea across mama (whistle) papa (whistle) Abuelo (whistle), and for some actually accurate ones without transcription there's this As I said before the four consonant system is an oversimplification and outdated There is an additional sharp distinction to acute and grave, and a gradual decay separate to the interrupted and continuous But I'm not gonna go into them In any case if you are making your own magical language You probably want to make a chart something like this and convert all your consonants into it The cultural importance of whistled languages varies from 'citation needed' Nahuatl to Integral part of a language with inbuilt gender roles, Chinantec, for reference those gender roles are that men speak the language, but women don't even though they generally understand it Whilst as I said before we don't exactly know how whistled language just came about, I would guess this is the result of heavy gender Roles especially ones that place women in positions where long-distance communication isn't at all necessary Obviously most cultures and especially pre-modern ones have some hefty gender roles But in most cases there's still a reason for women to learn to whistle say you're in a fairly standard tribal hunter-gatherer setup when men hunt and women gather Well whistling is probably more useful for hunting but long-range communication in forests while foraging could easily be a lifesaver Hence women would use the language and it wouldn't become a cultural norm for them not to, so gendered usage distinctions Probably requires some pretty hefty cultural stuff, once existent whistling will generally be used for long-distance communication and in crowds to call over everyone without yelling but also for closer stuff like just for fun and people going to see each Other might start chatting from distance via whistling as long as they don't mind being overheard and slip sometimes in mid-sentence from whistles a spoken word communication Whistles may also be used for social communication Both in the former type of town crier calling an entire town with a volume of the whistle but also to warn people of approaching threats, for example if Pirates approached la Gomera, once one person noticed this approach they could just whistle as loud as they could with the ship was coming and spread the message and soon enough the whistle would be ringing across the entire island upscaling this a bit obviously these whistles aren't as reliable and won't go as far and as fast as fiery beacons for signaling an enemy invasion of a country But they are more detailed and if you had a whole country or at least countryside of whistlers who spoke the same language it's imaginable to have some kind of Countrywide whistle warning system to alert the capital of enemy invasions and give detailed descriptions while doing it But leaving wild speculation and going back to known effects The whistles are known to have been used for secretive Communication when some people don't understand the language, apparently farmers from lower regions of local ls Gomera would whistle to their brethren higher up to warn them if anyone was being searched for by the police Something would also be amiss here if I didn't bring up how almost all of these whistled languages are dying, exact reasons vary but it's often because they're seen as rural peasant things Unnecessary with the invention of phones and walkie-talkies or just inferior to learning the country's language Silbo Gomero, for example, went through a decline from the 1950s up until the late 90s where it was given official protection and introduced as a mandatory primary and secondary school subject in 1999, as such the vast majority of speakers are either quite old or quite young with very few speakers in between and the reason for The decline of course was people turning away from agriculture and viewing el Silbo with a negative rural peasant association So this is a segment I've put together speculating about whistling languages and their role in different fictional scenarios Firstly the idea of an independent whistling language that is, is a whistling language without a spoken equivalent. The problem with something like this developing is twofold The first problem is that unlike learning a native language as a baby Babies can't really learn whistling languages as a baby since you have to learn to whistle first I'm not even really sure what would happen if you tried to raise baby only whistling Maybe they would start humming back until they could learn to whistle. Maybe just not speak till then maybe never I guess I'll add it to the list of mad experiments I'll try if I ever become an evil scientist, obviously a child could be raised with a spoken language and a different whistled one But the problem is here. We do actually have a case study There was formerly a language called Guanch in the canary islands before the invasion of a Spanish and they did have a whistled form of their language But as Spanish took over the Guanche people They just started whistling Spanish instead suggesting people will just whistle whatever their native languages is regardless Now if the English had invaded the Canaries And a very unwhistlable language like English had replaced Guanche, maybe things would have been different But unfortunately, I think Guanche living on in whistles is probably the least likely outcome anyway Whistled languages would also be a fairly interesting way to do magical languages since they do sound somewhat interestingly Natural and magical probably because of how much they sound like birdsong, to the extent you get whistlers like Marcos Dominguez Who, one day, walking through a cornfield heard someone call him in whistle. He whistled back 'Here I am' only to get no response and then realize he'd mistaken a regular bird's call for whistled language Of course if you're going for a magical language without ambiguity and all nouns are the true names of a thing The number of distinct sounds in a whistled language could cause problems, but maybe there are just very specific whistled notes You have to hit, and magical folks have to spend vast quantities of their youth in whistling lessons Learning to hit the notes correctly because if you whistle wrong, you could risk any number of magical catastrophes. As for sci-fi settings It could be interesting to explore to what extent the typical Universal Translator technology and these things will work on whistles since they're quite departed from your standard speech, and also their cultural importance and overall existence in a society where all of their traditional uses have been taken over by machines with Cyborgs people easily able to communicate to each other in seconds with no vocal communication at all, for that matter They could be interesting in dystopian societies for communication when using the regieme's Technology isn't safe and serve as a nice bit of countered symbolism with the natural sounding bird song directly contrasting the mechanical communications of the regime Anyway, I don't really have anything much to say here, maybe that I'm still mad I can't whistle with my hands… ah well, if you want them, I have videos on making languages for you to then make a whistling language out of and other videos too. If you want more of this kind of content, you could even subscribe. Thank you for watching and good night
