Silbo
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The Silbo Gomero ("Gomeran whistle") is a whistled language spoken by inhabitants of La Gomera in the Canary Islands to communicate across the deep valleys (barrancos) that radiate through the island (Busnel and Classe 1976: 1). A speaker of Silbo Gomero is sometimes referred to as a "Silbadore".
Little is known of the original language or languages of the Canaries, though it is assumed they must have had a simple enough phonological/phonetic system to allow an efficient whistled language (ibid: 9-10). Invented by the original inhabitants of the island, the Guanches, and spoken also on el Hierro, Tenerife, and Gran Canaria, Silbo was adapted to Spanish by the last Guanches and adopted by the Spanish settlers in the 16th century and thus survived after the extinction of the Guanches. In 1976 Silbo barely remained on el Hierro, where it had flourished at the end of the nineteenth century (ibid: 8). When this unique medium of communication was about to die out early in the 21st century, the local government required all children to study it in school. The language's survival before that point was due to topography or terrain and the ease with which it is learned by native speakers (ibid: 10-11).
As with other whistled forms of non-tonal languages, the Silbo works by retaining approximately the articulation of ordinary speech, so "the timbre variations of speech appear in the guise of pitch variations" (Busnel and Classe: v). The language is a whistled form of the local dialect of Spanish (ibid: 54ff). The vowel system is very similar to standard (Castilian) Spanish: there are five pure vowels (a e i o u) and a number of diphthongs (ai ei oi au eu ou). The pure vowels are realised as flat tones, the diphthongs as sequences of vowels. Busnel and Classe list 18 consonants of Gomero Spanish relevant to the Silbo, and these are realised as on- and off-glides to the vowels, though not all are distinguished (in particular the Silbo does not distinguish between /n/ and /ñ/).
Manuel Carreiras of the University of La Laguna and David Corina of the University of Washington published research on Silbo in 2004 and 2005 arguing that Silbo was understood by the brain in much the same way as a spoken language. Their study of speakers of Spanish (some of whom "spoke" Silbo and some of whom did not) showed (by monitoring brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging) that while non-speakers of Silbo merely processed Silbo as whistling, speakers of Silbo processed the whistling sounds in the same linguistic centers of the brain that processed Spanish sentences.
References
- Busnel, R.G. and Classe, A. (1976). Whistled Languages. New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0387077138.
- Nature 433, 31 - 32 (06 January 2005); doi:10.1038/433031a
External link
- Canary Island whistles again (from BBC) (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3241128.stm)
- Reuters article on the research of Carreiras and Corina (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=585&e=3&u=/nm/20050105/sc_nm/science_language_dc)
- Silbo Gomero - The Whistling Language (CogNews) (http://cognews.com/1069225595/index_html)
- University of Washington site, with two audio examples of Silbo (http://www.uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=7171)