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 effecient 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).
The language has 2 vowels and 4 consonants and more than 4000 words can be expressed. Since Spanish is not a tonal language words are realized in whistling through transforming the timbral variations produced by the tongue and soft palate into pitch variations while whistling (ibid: v).
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
SilboGomero is a whistled language from La Gomera, one of the smaller islands of the Canary archipelago.
It is a surrogate of the Spanish language, consisting in a whistled encoding of Spanish as spoken on the island.
Until about twenty years ago, SilboGomero was used as a means of long-distance communication by all the inhabitants of the mountainous centre of the island, to convey a wide variety of messages (indeed any message at all, according to La Gomera residents).
Juan Cabello demonstrates the whistling 'SilboGomero' language on the island of Gomera.
Silbo -- the word comes from Spanish verb silbar, meaning to whistle -- features four "vowels" and four "consonants" that can be strung together to form more than 4,000 words.
Silbo was once used throughout the hilly terrain of La Gomera as an ingenious way of communicating over long distances.
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