Phonological and phonetic aspects of whistled languages*

This article examines phonological and phonetic aspects of whistled languages. A whistled language is a system of whistled communication which allows fluent subjects to transmit and exchange a potentially unlimited set of messages over long distances. In this respect, they are quite different from communication systems limited to a repertoire of stereotyped messages. For example, the whistled formulas used by certain herders or animal trainers do not constitute whistled languages as such. A further respect in which true whistled languages differ from other types of whistled communication is that they encode auditory features of spoken languages by transposing key components of speech sounds. This article examines this second aspect of whistled languages. It will show that there are two types of whistled languages: 1) those based on nontone languages, which transpose formants, and 2) those based on tone languages, which transpose tones. However, both types are similar in most other respects. Both tranpose the basic amplitude envelope of the spoken utterance they are transposing. This envelope has a dual function, assigning whistled sounds to a small number of major classes while providing a frame for the alignment of whistled melodies with phone boundaries. In addition, both types of whistled languages have a phonological structure which is related to, but partly independent of that of the spoken language they transpose. This structure involves acoustically-defined features, similar to the acoustic correlates of spoken language features but subject to the specific constraints of the whistled medium. We will show that these features can be viewed as primitives organized into a simple hierarchical organization. The discussion is organized as follows. Section 1 of this article examines formantbased whistled languages. General background information is given in section 1.1. The main phonological and phonetic features of Silbo Gomero, a whistled language of the Canary islands, are presented in section 1.2, and Silbo Gomero is compared with the Turkish whistled language of Kusköy in section 1.3. Section 2 of the article is devoted to tone-based whistled languages. Background information is given in section 2.1. Two case studies then follow, one involving a whistled language based on Hmong (a Hmong-Mien language of China and Indochina) in section 2.2, and the other a whistled language based on Moba (a Gur language of Togo) in section 2.3. Section 3 offers general conclusions.