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 "Silbador". Whistled languages are spoken languages conveyed through the medium of whistling. ... La Gomera is also a Guatemalan city in the department of Escuintla, see La Gomera, Guatemala La Gomera is a Spanish island, the second smallest island of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. ... Canaries redirects here. ...

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. 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 in the late 20th century, the local government required all Gomeran 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). Guanches (also: Guanchis or Guanchos) were the aboriginal inhabitants of the Canary Islands, now extinct. ... El Hierros western end was for long time considered the end of the known world by the Europeans El Hierro, nicknamed Isla del Meridiano (The Meridian Island), is a Spanish island. ... Flag of Tenerife Tenerife (English also Teneriffe), a Spanish island, is the largest of the seven Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. ... Gran Canaria, rarely Grand Canary (archaic), is the second largest island of the Canary Islands, an archipelago located in the Atlantic Ocean 210 km from the northwest coast of Africa and belonging to Spain. ... 1976 (MCMLXXVI) is a leap year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). ...

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).

Ramón Trujillo of the University of La Laguna published his EL SILBO GOMERO análisis lingüístico in 1978. This work containing almost a hundred spectrograms proves conclusively that there are only two vowels and four consonants in the Silbo Gomero language. The vowels can be either high or low, and the consonants are either rises or dips in the “melody line” which can be broken or continuous. The University of La Laguna is situated in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, on the island of Tenerife. ...

Trujillo’s 2005 collaboration describes in detail the areas of divergence between his empirical data and Classe’s phonetic hypotheses. EL SILBO GOMERO Materiales didácticos is the defining work on the subject (as of this writing this book is only available in Spanish – however it is freely available online in its entirety).

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. The University of La Laguna is situated in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, on the island of Tenerife. ... The University of Washington, founded in 1861, is a major public research university in the Seattle metropolitan area. ... Comparative brain sizes In the anatomy of animals, the brain, or encephalon (Greek for in the head), is the higher, supervisory center of the nervous system. ... Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (or fMRI) describes the use of MRI to measure the hemodynamic response related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals. ...

References

• Trujillo, R., et al (2005). EL SILBO GOMERO. Materiales didácticos. Canary Islands: Consejería De Educación, Cultura y Deportes Del Gobierno De Canarias - Dirección General De Ordenación e Innovación Educativa. ISBN 84-689-2610-8.
• Trujillo, R. (1990). The Gomeran Whistle: Linguistic Analysis (English translation: Brent, J.). Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Library of Congress, Washington, DC (unpublished).
• Trujillo, R. (1978). EL SILBO GOMERO: análisis lingüístico. Santa Cruz de Tenerife: I. Canaria. ISBN 84-85543-03-3.
• Busnel, R.G. and Classe, A. (1976). Whistled Languages. New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0387077138.
• Carreiras M, Lopez J, Rivero F, Corina D (2005). Linguistic perception: neural processing of a whistled language. Nature 433 (7021): 31-32. PMID 15635400

Nature is one of the oldest and most reputable scientific journals, first published on 4 November 1869. ...

External links

• EL SILBO GOMERO. Materiales didácticos. URL accessed on 2005-12-28.
• The Whistling Language of La Gomera. URL accessed on 2005-12-28.
• Canary Island whistles again. BBC News. URL accessed on 2005-07-14.
• Silbo Gomero - The Whistling Language. CogNews. URL accessed on 2005-07-14.
• Shepherds whistle while they work and brains process sounds as language. University of Washington News and Information. URL accessed on 2005-07-14. — with two audio examples of Silbo
• Silbo MP3