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The Whisteling Language of La Gomera

A mysterious whistle from the past echoes in the mountains of La Gomera

Roque de Agando, La Gomera. Photo by Tamara Kulikova on WikimediaCommons.

Mountain after mountain, valley after valley as far as the eyes can reach, this landscape keeps repeating itself infinitely. These emerald green mountains and valleys with their constantly repeating pattern make up the roller coaster-like Canarian landscape. The landscape itself holds the secret and reason behind why the whistling language developed here.

Without a direct way of communication due to the inaccessibility of the landscape, one can easily understand the need for a whistling language. It must have made daily life easier in a revolutionary way for the Guanches, the original inhabitants of the Canary Islands at the time.

Studies show that external communication, between the islands, was scarce due to insufficient knowledge of sailing. The internal communication, within an island, was also difficult because of the complexity and inaccessibility of the landscape, especially before the arrival of the whistling language.

San Sebastián de La Gomera. Photo by Bernhard1960 on Pixabay.

The Canarian whistling language or the “Silbo” is a tonal language, which is still practiced by many inhabitants in the Canary Islands today. The reason for the language is to be able to communicate with others over large distances, through mountains and valleys. The ones practicing the language are known as “whistlers”.

Practically, any language can be transformed into the Silbo, as it is translated into tunes recognisable from a distance.

From the beginning, it was used for the original language of the native inhabitants the “Guanches”. After the disappearance of the Tamazight or Canarian Berber it has come to be used with the Spanish language.

View of Teide from La Gomera. Photo by ravelinerin on Pixabay.

With the Silbo from La Gomera, it is possible to exchange messages in distances up to five kilometres! This whistling language uses six different sounds, two for vowels and four for consonants, with these sounds it’s possible to express more than 4. 000 words.

There are also other whistling languages elsewhere. Some of these tonal languages have four sounds for vowels and four for consonants, thus a total of eight different sounds. Common for all these languages is that the sounds are approximates to the original language, variations are common and confusions possible.

There is very little information available about the original language of the Guanches, but we do know that it probably originated in North Africa.

Vallehermoso La Gomera. Photo by Tony Hisgett on Flickr.

We also know that the whistling language was created by these native Canarians, as a tool of communication, and it was originally used in El Hierro, Tenerife, Gran Canaria and La Gomera.

After the conquest of the Canarian archipelago in the 16th century, the last prehispánic natives in La Gomera finally adapted the Silbo to Spanish, the reason for this was most probably the extinction of their own language. The Silbo gradually disappeared from the rest of the island but still lives on in La Gomera, the second smallest island in the archipelago.

The whistling language had a much more profound impact here than on the rest of the islands and this proved to be the key to its survival.

Speaking of survival, in the 20th century with the arrival of mobile telephones and other ways of communication, in addition to emigration of the Gomeran population in search of a better life, there was a steep decline in the use of the whistling language.

In 1990 started a revitalization campaign led by the Canarian government including educational and legislative measures together with efforts of the population as a whole. These efforts resulted in great progress for the Silbo.

The government adjusted the education by adding the whistling to the educational system and making it compulsory, and in 1999 they also declared the Silbo patrimonial heritage. A decade later the Gomeran whistle gained world recognition when UNESCO registered it in the list of intangible cultural heritage.

Today, the whistling language is a mandatory subject in schools in La Gomera with at least one hour of class weekly.

Garajonay National Park, La Gomera. Photo by nike159 on Pixabay.

Did you know that on average, around 25 languages disappear each year? Check out Andawn F.’s story to learn more fun facts about world languages.

Have Fun with Languages

If you love learning foreign languages too

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As per the report of UNESCO in 2009, a big majority of the population in La Gomera understands the whistling language, especially those born before 1950 as well as students attending school from 1999 onward.

The Silbo in La Gomera coexists with other tonal languages in the world, including those of Evian, an island in Greece and Kuskoy, in the east of Turkey and in the French Pyrenees. Nevertheless the “Gomeran whistle” is the only tonal language to have been studied thoroughly, as well as the one with most practicants.

Tonal languages are interesting from the point of view of being simple ways of communication; it makes it possible for us to study how a language first appears and then how languages develop in general.

The recognition and prestige the Gomeran Silbo has gained in the last years have had unexpected consequences. There are even competitions between native whistlers in Gomera to gain tourists’ attention.

We can finally conclude that the efforts of revitalization of the Silbo in La Gomera have been highly successful. Until now the Silbo has been passed on from generation to generation, we surely hope that it will continue that way and that we might be able to discover even more of the Guanches secrets!

The Fascinating Whistled Languages of the Canary Islands, Turkey & Mexico (and What They Say About the Human Brain)

For some years now linguist Daniel Everett has challenged the orthodoxy of Noam Chomsky and other linguists who believe in an innate “universal grammar” that governs human language acquisition. A 2007 New Yorker profile described his work with a reclusive Amazonian tribe called the Piraha, among whom Everett found a language “unrelated to any other extant tongue… so confounding to non-natives that” until he arrived in the 70s, “no outsider had succeeded in mastering it.” And yet, for all its extraordinary differences, at least one particular feature of Piraha is shared by humans across the globe—“its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations.”

In places as far flung as the Brazilian rainforest, mountainous Oaxaca, Mexico, the Canary Islands, and the Black Sea coast of Turkey, we find languages that sound more like the speech of birds than of humans. “Whistled languages,” writes Michelle Nijhuis in a recent New Yorker post, “have been around for centuries. Herodotus described communities in Ethiopia whose residents ‘spoke like bats,’ and reports of the whistled language that is still used in the Canary Islands date back more than six hundred years. ”

In the short video from UNESCO at the top of the post, you can hear the whistled language of Canary Islanders. (See another short video from Time magazine here.) Called Silbo Gomero, the language “replicates the islanders’ habitual language (Castilian Spanish) with whistling,” replacing “each vowel or consonant with a whistling sound.” Spoken (so to speak) among a very large community of over 22,000 inhabitants and passed down formally in schools and ceremonies, Silbo Gomero shows no signs of disappearing. Other whistled languages have not fared as well. As you will see in the documentary above, when it comes to the whistled language of northern Oaxacan peoples in a mountainous region of Mexico, “only a few whistlers still practice their ancient tongue.” In a previous Open Culture post on this film, Matthias Rascher pointed us toward some scholarly efforts at preservation from the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Mexico, who recorded and transcribed a conversation between two native Oaxacan whistlers.

Whistled languages evolved for much the same reason as birdcalls—they enable their “speakers” to communicate across large distances. “Most of the forty-two examples that have been documented in recent times,” Nijhuis writes, “arose in places with steep terrain or dense forests—the Atlas Mountains, in northwest Africa; the highlands of northern Laos, the Brazilian Amazon—where it might otherwise be hard to communicate at a distance.” Such is the case for the Piraha, the Canary Islanders, the Oaxacan whistlers, and another group of whistlers in a mountainous region of Turkey. As Nijhuis documents in her post, these several thousand speakers have learned to transliterate Turkish into “loud, lilting whistles” that they call “bird language.” New Scientist brings us the example of whistled Turkish above (with subtitles), and you can hear more recorded examples at The New Yorker.

As with most whistled languages, the Turkish “bird language” makes use of similar structures—though not similar sounds—as human speech, making it a bit like semaphore or Morse code. As such, whistled languages are not likely to offer evidence against the idea of a universal grammar in the architecture of the brain. Yet according to biopsychologist Onur Güntürkün—who conducted a study on the Turkish whistlers published in the latest Current Biology—these languages can show us that “the organization of our brain, in terms of its asymmetrical structure, is not as fixed as we assume.”

Where we generally process language in the left hemisphere and “pitch, melody, and rhythm” in the right, Nijhuis describes how the whistled Turkish study suggests “that both hemispheres played significant roles” in comprehension. The opportunities to study whistled languages will diminish in the years to come, as cell phones take over their function and more of their speakers lose regional distinctiveness. But the work of Güntürkün and other biological researchers may have fascinating implications for linguists as well, creating further connections between speech and music—and perhaps even between the speech of humans and that of other animals.

via The New Yorker

Related Content:

Speaking in Whistles: The Whistled Language of Oaxaca, Mexico

How Languages Evolve: Explained in a Winning TED-Ed Animation

Noam Chomsky Talks About How Kids Acquire Language & Ideas in an Animated Video by Michel Gondry

What Makes Us Human?: Chomsky, Locke & Marx Introduced by New Animated Videos from the BBC

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

Whistles are words to brains of those who speak special ‘language’

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January 6, 2005

The human brain’s remarkable flexibility to understand a variety of signals as language extends to an unusual whistle language used by shepherds on one of the Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa.  

And the way the brain processes these whistles is similar to the way it goes about deciphering English, Spanish or other spoken languages, according to research being published in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

“Science has developed the idea of brain areas that are dedicated to language and we are starting to understand the scope of signals that can be recognized as language,” said David Corina, a UW associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study.

“But how far can you stretch this idea?  Sign language studies have shown we can stretch the envelope and here we are expanding it in another way to a whistle language. The brain is adaptable, or plastic, in understanding a variety of forms of communication.”

The language studied by Corina and his colleague, Manuel Carreiras, a psychology professor at the University of La Laguna, on the island of Tenerife in the Canaries, is Silbo Gomero, or Silbo.  It is primarily used by shepherds to communicate with each other over long distances of rugged terrain on the island of La Gomera, another island in the Spanish owned Canaries.  (Go to end of story to hear examples.)

To see how the brain processes Silbo, the researchers recruited five silbadors, or speakers of Silbo, who also were fluent in Spanish and five Spanish speakers who did not understand Silbo. The word silbador comes from the Spanish verb silbar, which means to whistle.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to measure brain activation, or activity, during two tasks. The two groups first were given a passive listening task in which they listened to recorded sentences in Spanish and Silbo and were to keep track of what had been said. In the second task, the subjects listened to blocks of Spanish words for colors or animals and the equivalent “words” in Silbo. Individual recorded words were played once every three seconds. While having their brains scanned, the subjects were asked to keep track of how many times a target word or whistle appeared during a trial.

When the silbadores listened to the Silbo sentences, several regions were activated in the left hemisphere of their brains including ones in the posterior temporal-parietal region and the frontal premotor cortex. Research has shown these regions are involved in the comprehension and production of language. In addition, there was activation in the right hemisphere temporal lobe, an area believed to be involved in linguistic processing.

Both the silbadores and the Spanish speakers showed this pattern of bilateral activation when they listed to Spanish sentences. However, the results were different when the Spanish speakers listened to the Silbo sentences. Several brain regions were activated, but none has been specifically implicated in language processing, indicating they did not recognize Silbo as a language, Corina said.

The researchers found a similar pattern during the second tasks. While both subjects groups were able to detect the target whistle sound, only the silbadores showed bilateral brain activity in the language center. Data from both tasks showed a common focus of brain activity near the temporal-parietal junction among the silbadores.

“Our results provide more evidence about the flexibility of human capacity for language in a variety of forms,” said Corina. “These data suggest that left hemisphere language regions are uniquely adapted for communicative purposes, independent of the modality of signal.  The non-Silbo speakers were not recognizing Silbo as a language.  They had nothing to grab onto so multiple areas of their brains were activated.  But the Silbadores were analyzing it differently, as a language, and engaging those areas associated with language.”

Silbo is believed to have been brought to the island by Berbers from North Africa and today is a surrogate language for Spanish. It condenses Spanish into two vowels and four consonants.

“You wouldn’t call Silbo a full-fledged language. Children are not born whistling it,” Corina said.  “In general, anything in Spanish can be translated into Silbo, but context is very important.”

Silbo is an occupation-centered language and is used to say such things as “open the gate” or “there is a stray sheep.”  It is not the world’s only whistle language.  There are others in Greece, Turkey, China and Mexico, according to Corina.

The research was funded by Cabildo de La Gomera, the Spanish Ministry of Education and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology.  Co-authors of the paper were Jorge Lopez of IMETISA, Hospital Universitario de Canarias in Tenerife, and Francisco Rivero of the University of La Laguna.

Hear Silbo Gomero:
Silbo for “John milked the goats”:
http://www.uwnews.org/relatedcontent/2005/January/rc_parentID7171_thisID7263.wav
Silbe for “Domingo is sick”:
http://www.uwnews.org/relatedcontent/2005/January/rc_parentID7171_thisID7264.wav

Sing like a canary! The whistling consultant who taught Romanian noir gangsters a tune | Film

Try to imagine the least film-noir scene possible and you might come up with a group of five-year-olds learning to whistle. It is late morning, pre-lockdown, in a classroom at Nereida Díaz Abreu school on La Gomera in the Canary Islands, and the teacher – a bent knuckle crammed in his mouth – is relaying instructions in a piercing, swooping, set of whistles. The kids look quizzically skywards, then collapse in hysterics, although most eventually nail it.

“Touch your left ear with your right hand,” the teacher reiterates in Spanish.

“Ay-ay-ay!” the children hoot in disbelief.

They are learning the el silbo gomero, the island’s whistling language, which dates back at least to the 15th century and is now the unlikely star of a new Romanian film noir, The Whistlers. A bent Bucharest cop Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) is summoned to the distant island by a local drug gang to learn their secret language, so he can help them retrieve €30m stolen by their eastern European middleman. It is a rich, roundabout handbook on the subtleties of communication; even the film’s structure, a series of flashbacks in which you are perpetually looking for who is double-crossing whom, seems to collude in this.

With its deep-cut volcanic ravines, shaggy Tolkienian laurel forest and Tenerife’s volcano floating above the cloudline, La Gomera hits the visual jackpot. But the film’s director, Corneliu Porumboiu, insists it was the island’s aural dimension that attracted him. He came across el silbo 10 years ago on a French TV documentary; the Canaries’ Spanish colonists inherited the language from La Gomera’s Guanche inhabitants, who used it to communicate across the steep valleys. “It was this strange kind of bird language that seemed to come from ancient times. So for me using this in a super-technological society created a certain type of tension and poetry – and was funny as well,” Porumboiu says.

Contrary to film noir’s most famous whistling tip, from Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not – “You just put your lips together and blow” – el silbo takes some mastering. The film’s silbo consultant, Kico Correa, insisted the lead actors had to learn for real. “It’s been classified as Unesco World Heritage, so it needs to be treated with special respect,” he explains to me at a harbourside cafe. “You can dub the sound, but the lip movements needed to be credible. ”

Ivanov and Catrinel Marlon, who plays the film’s moll, Gilda, were both put on to a two-week silbo crash course in Bucharest, followed up later with Skype sessions. It was not simply a case of training in the physical mechanics, but also how to understand its system of letter substitution. It strips down an underlying language – Spanish, in La Gomera’s case – to just two vowels and four consonants. The same approximate whistling pitch, for example, is used for “A”, “O” and “U”. Rephrasings, clarifying questions and awareness of the context at hand are sometimes needed to avoid misunderstandings.

Even though the actors’ whistling was eventually dubbed by the island’s silbo teachers, Correa gives them A for effort. Marlon, who started slightly later than Ivanov, had more natural aptitude, he says. A fashion model, she whistled so hard during practice that she had to pull out of a photoshoot in Italy because her lips were too chafed.

Porumboiu lasted just a single day on the course because he was busy preparing the film. The Whistlers is a clear break from the garrulous, sly and sometimes wilfully pedantic arthouse he produced when he graduated as a leading light of the 00s Romanian new wave. But the film’s use of el silbo is perfectly in line with the director’s longstanding interest in communication; how the relationship between language and meaning is rarely straightforward.

It is there in his debut 12:08 East of Bucharest, with its radio show guests bickering about how the exact moment the news of Ceauşescu’s deposal was relayed to their backwater town is crucial to deciding whether it can be said an actual revolution took place there. Or the police captain played by Ivanov in Police, Adjective, who turns to the dictionary for the definition of his profession to solve a crisis of conscience. Or the bureaucrat in Porumboiu’s last film, Infinite Football, whose tinkering with the rules of the sport doesn’t pan out in reality. The director wrings out a colourful stream of comic possibility from misinterpretation in these films, but language, via el silbo, plays a darker, concealing role in The Whistlers, a world in which people can rarely express themselves truthfully.

The director, speaking on the phone under lockdown in the Romanian countryside, is at a loss to explain his interest in the theme. “To be honest, I’m not doing it on purpose. It’s a personal matter, this feeling that we don’t understand each other.” Where does it come from? “I think it’s coming from … my inability … ” He tails off.

We say to the kids: when you go to Tenerife and say you’re from La Gomera, people will ask you if you can whistle

Kiko Correa

Back in March on La Gomera, I am having my own communication issues. Five minutes of efforts better described as spitting than whistling are enough to leave my deoxygenated head spinning. But Correa – a short, calm Gomero who resembles Robert Forster – has had to learn patience in his day job organising the island’s silbo syllabus. The language had virtually died out in the 1970s, associated with a peasant lifestyle many people were keen to leave behind. Correa’s parents were among a minority who didn’t view it as backward. “My family thought differently: we’re going to make our children learn it, so they can be in advance,” he says in French, the only language both of us understand.

El silbo’s moment came in the late 90s, when an upsurge in interest resulted in a push to make it compulsory on the school curriculum. Now learning it for half an hour each week is obligatory for six-year-olds and upwards; three- to five-year-olds also receive tuition, mostly in comprehension. “We don’t make a big effort to say: ‘You should learn it to support your culture,’” says Correa. “It’s too much weight for kids. We encourage them to do it for fun. We say: ‘When you go to Tenerife and say you’re from La Gomera, people are going to ask you if you can whistle.’”

I also sit in on an impressively adept classroom of teenagers, chattering away in silbo like manic songbirds. But how much do they use it in everyday life? Marta, a regular victor in the class’s silbo competitions, says: “Sometimes. For fun. But mobile phones are easier.” Gabriel, rosy-cheeked with an unexpected Mancunian accent (his family came to live on La Gomera nine years ago), sheepishly admits he doesn’t practise enough. He can understand the language, but his whistling is below par: “We only have lessons once a week, but I can’t really do it.”

The education programme is vital for preserving this rare offshoot of the world linguistic tree. But from the silence reigning over La Gomera’s stepped basalt cliffs, where there are few shepherds now, it is clear that it’s not quite a living language, either; it’s mostly heard in classrooms or in restaurants, in demonstrations for tourists.

While The Whistlers is unlikely to make the island’s hills suddenly alive with the sound of unusually articulate birds, it should help magnify el silbo’s worldwide cultural status. Correa appears briefly in the film as a Gomero gangster, but was originally slated for a bigger part as the teacher; as Porumboiu learned more about the language and the role expanded, it called for a professional actor. Correa, though, is not disappointed. The sound of his ear-splitting whistles ringing out between Bucharest apartment blocks on screen testify to him having fully communicated his passion: “My character in the film is el silbo. It’s me.”

The Whistlers and Infinite Football will stream from 8 May in the UK and Ireland on Curzon Home Cinema

– IELTS is fun to learn

READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26 which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

La Gomera is one of the Canary Islands situated in the Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of Africa. This small volcanic island is mountainous, with steep rocky slopes and deep, wooded ravines, rising to 1,487 metres at its highest peak (Q14). It is also home to the best known of the world’s whistle ‘languages’, a means of transmitting information over long distances which is perfectly adapted to the extreme terrain of the island.

This ‘language’, known as ‘Silbo’ or ‘Silbo Gomero’ – from the Spanish word for ‘whistle’ – is now shedding light on the language-processing abilities of the human brain, according to scientists. Researchers say that Silbo activates parts of the brain normally associated with spoken language, suggesting that the brain is remarkably flexible in its ability to interpret sounds as language.

‘Science has developed the idea of brain areas that are dedicated to language, and we are starting to understand the scope of signals that can be recognised as language,’ says David Corina, co-author of a recent study and associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Silbo is a substitute for Spanish, with individual words recoded into whistles which have high- and low-frequency tones (Q20). A whistler – or silbador – puts a finger in his or her mouth to increase the whistle’s pitch (Q21), while the other hand can be cupped to adjust the direction of the sound (Q22). ‘There is much more ambiguity in the whistled signal than in the spoken signal,’ explains lead researcher Manuel Carreiras, psychology professor at the University of La Laguna on the Canary island of Tenerife. Because whistled ‘words’ can be hard to distinguish, silbadores rely on repetition, as well as awareness of context, to make themselves understood.

The silbadores of Gomera are traditionally shepherds and other isolated mountain folk, and their novel means of staying in touch allows them to communicate over distances of up to 10 kilometres. Carreiras explains that silbadores are able to pass a surprising amount of information via their whistles. ‘In daily life they use whistles to communicate short commands (Q23), but any Spanish sentence could be whistled.’ (Q15) Silbo has proved particularly useful when fires have occurred on the island and rapid communication across large areas has been vital (Q24).

The study team used neuroimaging equipment to contrast the brain activity of silbadores while listening to whistled and spoken Spanish. Results showed the left temporal lobe of the brain, which is usually associated with spoken language, was engaged during the processing of Silbo. The researchers found that other key regions in the brain’s frontal lobe also responded to the whistles, including those activated in response to sign language among deaf people. When the experiments were repeated with non-whistlers, however, activation was observed in all areas of the brain (Q16).

‘Our results provide more evidence about the flexibility of human capacity for language in a variety of forms,’ Corina says. ‘These data suggest that left-hemisphere language regions are uniquely adapted for communicative purposes, independent of the modality of signal. The non-Silbo speakers were not recognising Silbo as a language. They had nothing to grab onto, so multiple areas of their brains were activated.’

Carreiras says the origins of Silbo Gomero remain obscure, but that indigenous Canary Islanders, who were of North African origin, already had a whistled language when Spain conquered the volcanic islands in the 15th century (Q17). Whistled languages survive today in Papua New Guinea, Mexico, Vietnam, Guyana, China, Nepal, Senegal, and a few mountainous pockets in southern Europe. There are thought to be as many as 70 whistled languages still in use, though only 12 have been described and studied scientifically (Q18). This form of communication is an adaptation found among cultures where people are often isolated from each other, according to Julien Meyer, a researcher at the Institute of Human Sciences in Lyon, France. ‘They are mostly used in mountains or dense forests,’ he says. ‘Whistled languages are quite clearly defined and represent an original adaptation of the spoken language for the needs of isolated human groups.’

But with modern communication technology now widely available, researchers say whistled languages like Silbo are threatened with extinction (Q25). With dwindling numbers of Gomera islanders still fluent in the language, Canaries’ authorities are taking steps to try to ensure its survival. Since 1999, Silbo Gomero has been taught in all of the island’s elementary schools (Q19). In addition, locals are seeking assistance from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). ‘The local authorities are trying to get an award from the organisation to declare [Silbo Gomero] as something that should be preserved for humanity,’ (Q26) Carreiras adds.

Questions 14-19

14 La Gomera is the most mountainous of all the Canary Islands. NOT GIVEN [Locate]

15 Silbo is only appropriate for short and simple messages. FALSE [Locate]

16 In the brain-activity study, silbadores and non-whistlers produced different results. TRUE [Locate]

17 The Spanish introduced Silbo to the islands in the 15th century. FALSE [Locate]

18 There is precise data available regarding all of the whistle languages in existence today. FALSE [Locate]

19 The children of Gomera now learn Silbo. TRUE [Locate]

Questions 20-26

Silbo Gomero

How Silbo is produced

● high- and low-frequency tones represent different sounds in Spanish 20…words… [Locate]

● pitch of whistle is controlled using silbador’s 21…finger… [Locate]

● 22…direction… [Locate] is changed with a cupped hand

How Silbo is used

● has long been used by shepherds and people living in secluded locations

● in everyday use for the transmission of brief 23…commands… [Locate]

● can relay essential information quickly, e.g. to inform people about 24…fires… [Locate]

The future of Silbo

● future under threat because of new 25…technology… [Locate]

● Canaries’ authorities hoping to receive a UNESCO 26…award… [Locate] to help preserve it

Whistled Languages Around The World

What’s in a whistle? Entire worlds, for one.  When we whistle to pass the time or to get someone’s attention, we’re kind of wasting our potential. For millennia and in just about every region of the world, humans have been conducting complex conversations through whistled languages, and these “bird languages” may even be an important indicator of how human language originated.

What’s Up With Whistled Languages?

As far back as the 5th century B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus described cave-dwelling Ethiopians whose “speech is like no other in the world: it is like the squeaking of bats.”

Whistled languages have historically almost always originated in remote, mountainous villages or dense forests, where environmental conditions required a method of communication that could travel over long distances. Whistles don’t echo as much as shouts, which means they’re less likely to get distorted or scare away potential prey. They also require less exertion on the part of the speaker, and they can travel up to 10 kilometers (just over 6 miles) in some cases, which is many times farther than shouts, thanks to the narrow, high-pitched frequency of the sound. There are as many as 70 of these languages in total.

Julien Meyer, a researcher at the University of Grenoble in France, has studied whistled languages extensively, and he hypothesizes that whistling might have been a precursor to spoken language. This is not altogether different from a theory proposed by Charles Darwin that singing and whistling both formed a sort of “musical protolanguage.”

One thing that’s important to understand about whistled languages is that they’re always based on the local spoken language. According to Meyer, regions of the world where “tonal” languages exist, like in Asia, tend to produce whistled languages that replicate the melodies of the spoken sentences. Other languages, like Spanish and Turkish, produce whistled versions that imitate the various changes in resonance that accompany different vowel sounds, with consonants conveyed by abrupt shifts from note to note.

Additionally, whistled tongues have revealed surprising information about the way our brain processes language. It has been traditionally understood that the left hemisphere does most of the work when it comes to processing language — at least in the “traditional” sense of the word. As it turns out, recent studies have suggested that whistled languages are handled equally by both hemispheres.

Most interesting of all, though, are the very human stories they tell — from the Canary Islands to the Amazon, the Laotian highlands, the Atlas Mountains, Papua New Guinea, the Bering Strait, the Pyrenees, and back again.

Kuşköy’s Bird Language

Up in the mountains of Northern Turkey, in the Çanakçı district of Giresun, there’s a single village, Kuşköy, where whistled languages still persist (to a degree). Though the bird language had once been prevalent throughout the mountainous region, it’s mostly spoken only by shepherds today, and text messaging has threatened its total extinction.

No longer passed down to younger generations, most living speakers are aging. Among the youth who do learn it, it’s more often the men who learn it as a matter of pride. Kuşköy still maintains an annual Bird Language Festival.

Turkey’s “bird language” was recently recognized by UNESCO and added to its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding.

Antia’s Sfyria

In the small village of Antia, tucked away on the inclines of Mount Ochi on the Greek island of Evia, the residents whistle a language known as sfyria. For thousands of years, the language has been passed down through the generations of shepherds and farmers. According to some residents, the language either came from Persian soldiers hiding in the mountains roughly 2,500 years ago, or from the Byzantine era, when locals needed a cryptic way to warn each other of danger. Some say that whistlers from Antia would act as sentries in the times of ancient Athens to warn of attack against the empire.

The story of sfyria is similar to the story of Turkey’s bird language, in that the remaining speakers are all aging out, in some cases losing their teeth (and their ability to make the sounds). Today, with only six people on the planet who can speak the language, it is one of the most endangered in the world.

The word “sfyria” comes from the Greek sfyrizo, or “whistle,” but its use transcends the needs of empire and agriculture. One resident told the following story to the BBC: “One night, a man was in the mountains with his sheep when it started snowing. He knew that somewhere deep in the mountains there was a beautiful girl from Antia with her goats. So he found a cave, built a fire and whistled to her to come keep warm. She did, and that’s how my parents fell in love.”

In the above documentary, Dr. Mark Sicoli, assistant professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University, studies the whistled Chinantec language.

San Pedro Sochiapam’s Chinantec

In Oaxaca, Mexico, the village of San Pedro Sochiapam is where the Chinantec people live among mountainside cornfields and hilly footpaths.

The Chinantec language, which has been around since pre-Hispanic times, can account for past and future tense and reach distances of up to 1 kilometer (about two-thirds of a mile). Whistling was also used in supplement to other Mesoamerican languages, like Mazatec, Zapotec and Mixtec.

But here, as with everywhere else, the need for whistled language is declining, which means there is only a handful of people left who are still proficient in this tongue. This is partly owing to a lack of interest among younger generations, but also partly to a decline in coffee production, which once made up more than 30 percent of the state’s exports. That, and people seem more inclined to use cellphones and walkie-talkies these days.

La Gomera’s Silbo

In the Canary Islands of Spain, whistled language is said to have originated among the North African inhabitants prior to the arrival of the first European settlers in the 15th century. When the Spanish came, the natives adapted their whistling language to more closely resemble Spanish.

Back in the day, when whistling was a matter of necessity, the locals would whistle to each other to avoid the Guardia Civil, who would come to pick them up when the mountain caught fire, often using them as unpaid labor to extinguish the blaze. Though Silbo slowly began to die out after the ’50s, a renewed interest arrived by the late ’90s thanks to a move to make it a required subject at primary school.

UNESCO’s short documentary on the Silbo language of La Gomera.

Himalayan H’mong

In the foothills of the Himalayas, the H’mong people use whistled language in farming and hunting contexts, but they also use it as a form of courtship.

Though rarely deployed in this manner nowadays, the whistled language would be used by boys who wandered through nearby villages in the past, whistling their favorite poems. In some cases, a girl might respond, and the two might begin flirting with each other in this manner.

According to the BBC, the romance of this ritual is heightened by the fact that whistling is much more anonymous than speaking, and some couples might create their own personal codes (like Pig Latin, but for whistling). This creates a sense of privacy in what is otherwise a very public exchange.

What are whistling languages ​​and who speaks them – Knife

The first mention of whistling languages ​​is found in the “History” of Herodotus, dated to the 5th century BC. e. “Their speech is unlike any other in the world: it resembles the squeak of bats” – this is how he described the cave dwellers of Ethiopia. There is no reliable data on exactly which tribes communicated in this way, but whistling languages ​​can still be heard in the Omo Valley in Ethiopia.

In ancient Chinese texts dated to the 8th century A.D. e, there is a description of a Taoist practice, the name of which can be translated as “Principles of whistling.” This is one of the earliest works on phonetics: it describes what exercises you need to do to learn how to whistle correctly, and also gives twelve specific whistling techniques, with instructions on the location of the tongue and lips, breath control, etc. It was believed that whistling poetry immerses a person in a meditative state. Whistling communities of the Hmong and Akha still exist in southern China.

The first indisputable historical evidence for the existence of a sibilant form of the tongue is found in the work of two Franciscan priests who accompanied the French explorer Jean de Bethencourt, who went to conquer the Canary Islands in 1402.

In their diary, published under the title “The Canary”, the priests Bontier and Le Verrière mention that the inhabitants of the islands spoke “with two lips, as if they had no tongue.”

Later research revealed that they encountered a whistling form of the Berber language.

In the Americas, the earliest evidence of the practice of whistling comes from 1755, when a Jesuit historian reported a whistling form of speech among the Aigua people of Paraguay: “They use a language that is difficult to learn because they whistle rather than talk.”

This property – the difficulty of learning whistled languages ​​by those not accustomed to people outside the community – was later exploited in military operations. During World War II, the Australian Army hired Wam native speakers from Papua New Guinea to whistle radio messages that Japanese eavesdroppers could not decipher. A similar tactic was used by the Americans during the First World War – they used the code letter of the Navajo Indians for communication.

As you can see, whistling languages ​​have existed for a long period of history and have been manifesting all over the world. Can this unusual form of communication, in which language and musicality are intertwined, help us learn more about the origins of language? Charles Darwin suggested the existence of a kind of “proto-language of music”. According to this view, people began to sing even before they could speak, perhaps as a kind of courtship ritual.

Like birds, people could demonstrate their virtuosity, strengthen social bonds and scare off rivals, even if the whistle did not carry practical information.

However, over time, this practice would lead us to more precise control of the vocal cords, which would lay the foundation for more meaningful utterances.

One of the most respected researchers in the field of whistling languages, Julien Meyer, suggests that whistling was one of the stages in the development of language that pushed people to more complex communication. He notes that while non-human primates cannot learn to speak, some have learned to whistle.

Bonnie, an orangutan at the National Zoo in Washington, DC, has learned to imitate the simple melodies of her caretaker Erin Stromberg, and wild orangutans have adapted to emit a high-pitched whistle by sucking air through a leaf.

Such manifestations suggest that whistling requires less effort than speech, making it an ideal stepping stone on the path to language. If this is true, then whistling signals may have started as a musical proto-language, and as they became more complex and filled with meaning, they turned into a way to coordinate hunting.

Meyer’s research suggests that whistling was a distinct survival advantage for our ancestors: they could communicate at a distance without attracting the attention of predators and prey. Later, people learned to control the vocal cords, but whistling languages ​​continued to be a small but important element of the human language repertoire.

Recognition and learning

It must be understood that whistling languages ​​are not separate units, but rather other forms of habitual languages. Only the form of communication is subject to change – the voice register of speech – and the semantic content remains the same. Thus, whistling speech is a phonetic adaptation of natural language that has appeared for communication over long distances, when it is not possible to see eye to eye or the natural features of the landscape do not allow this.

The principle of whistling speech is simple: while whistling, people syllable by syllable simplify and transform familiar words into whistling melodies.

Whistlers even emphasize that they whistle exactly as they think in their own language, and that the whistling messages they receive are instantly interpreted as ordinary speech. In most cases, experienced native speakers can whistle through any information and recognize non-standard sentences.

Another important feature that distinguishes a whistle from a whisper or shout is its illegibility for people from the outside. It cannot be called completely unique – in the end, even in your own language, it can be difficult to make out operatic singing. But in the case of a whistle, people often perceive it not as communication, but rather as a joke. Perhaps it is this aspect of secrecy that has allowed whistling languages ​​to “survive” for so long. At the same time, this mystery significantly limited possible research: whistling languages ​​were discovered by chance, and the number of speakers decreases every year.

Learn to whistle just like any other language. Children subconsciously get used to whistling speech signals if they hear them often enough, but they take a little longer to master. A child who speaks at 3 or 4 years old understands whistling language at 5-6 years old, but does not master it well enough until 10-12 years old. Another important point is that the vocabulary of whistlers is as rich and multifaceted as in ordinary speech. Another thing is that whistlers usually use a limited set of words that matches their daily activities.

Whistling languages, although found on many continents, persist only in remote or isolated communities.

They are not limited to a particular territory, language family or structure. Depending on the features of the landscape, patterns of communication are formed: for what needs the whistle is used and what technique the locals choose.

In the forests of Portugal and Brazil, they usually whistle during hunting. As a rule, people are not very far from each other, lips and hands are used for whistling. In the case of Mexican mountains with dense forests, locals coordinate farming: distances become longer, and lips and teeth are used for communication.

If we talk about sheer cliffs with sparse vegetation in Greece, Turkey, Spain or Africa, then shepherding prevails there, the distances are very large, and for whistling they resort to the help of fingers. Whistling speech becomes a kind of indicator of the preservation of traditions: the technique of whistling requires the transfer of skills from generation to generation, the continuation of the traditional way of life and the presence of the same ecosystem as before. The way of life changes very slowly due to the isolation of communities: mountains and dense forests slow down the penetration of civilization and restrict access to people from outside.

Examples of whistling languages ​​

As of 2018, there were about 70 whistled languages ​​in the world. The most famous and studied habitat of the whistling community was La Gomera, one of the non-tourist Canary Islands. Silbo Gomero was the first of the whistled languages ​​to receive the status of a living heritage of UNESCO, it also has the largest number of speakers – about 20 thousand.

The Silbo Homero language now plays an important role in the daily life of the island. It is taught in schools, it is used to attract the attention of tourists – in some restaurants, waiters transmit order details by whistling.

Teenagers sometimes earn extra money and put on a whole show for visitors, managing to adapt the whistle for other languages. However, since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, such practices have had to be abandoned – putting fingers in your mouth has become unsafe. Now schoolchildren do not practice whistling themselves, but listen to recordings.

The older generation notes that it is more difficult for them to understand young people who learn to whistle in school, and not in pastures. For them, such a whistle is too elegant and precise, and the vocabulary is richer and more diverse. Elderly residents of the island of La Gomera recall using silbo to warn locals of the arrival of the police. In Corneliu Porumboiu’s recent Romanian thriller The Whistlers, silbo is used as a secret code language by gangsters.

On the Greek island of Euboea, in the village of Antia, Sefirian is spoken, the sound of which resembles the sounds of birds. Sefiriya is one of the most endangered and rare languages ​​in the world. Most native speakers are farmers and shepherds.

Now the population of the village is 37 people, but most of them have lost their teeth, so they cannot whistle. In 2018, only 6 people spoke Sefirian fluently. Local residents are doing their best to preserve their language – they organize classes, write to the local administration with a request to open a school, and invite scientists to record the sound of the language. Scholars learned about the Sefirian language only in 1969, when a plane crashed in the mountains near Antia. Members of the search party heard the shepherds speaking in a whistling language. The range of communication in Sefirian can reach 4 kilometers.

In Mexico, Sochiapan Chinantec and Mazatec are used for whistling. The theoretical range of whistling can reach two kilometers, but the inhabitants prefer to communicate over short distances and for them it is more a way of socialization, and not a forced tool.

Mexican communities use whistles to talk in the market, a situation unique to whistling languages. Another surprising fact is that in Mexico only men communicate by whistling, although women usually understand what is being said.

In the north of Turkey, in the village of Kusköy, they speak the “language of birds”. It has been used in this area for many centuries and has about 10,000 speakers. In 2017, along with silbo gomero, it was included in the UNESCO list of oral and intangible cultural heritage in need of protection. Every year, the village hosts a festival dedicated to the traditions, history and culture of bird language. Recently, they began to study it at the elementary school and the Turkish University of Giresun at the Faculty of Tourism.

The Hmong people, who live in the foothills of the Himalayas in Vietnam, have their own version of a whistling language used by hunters and farmers. However, it also has another popular use – the language of courtship. Although rarely practiced today, young people used the whistling Hmong language as a language of flirtation. The boys wandered around the villages, whistling poetry to get the attention of the girls. If the girls reciprocated, this could be the beginning of a relationship.

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The rapid development of technology has significantly reduced the need for whistling, but network coverage is still faltering in high mountainous areas. Elderly residents of whistling communities try to pass on their knowledge to young people, participate in festivals dedicated to language traditions and often ignore mobile phones, preferring to communicate in a proven way. Adolescents resort to whistling much less often, but still periodically train and are interested in the ancient skill. For them, this is a way to get closer to history and understand the origins of local traditions. Another important feature of whistling comes in handy from time to time – this way you can quickly convey information that is not intended for other people’s ears. One way or another, whistling tongues remain a unique phenomenon, many mysteries of which have yet to be solved.

Whistle Language – Language Heroes Library

“For me, words are not letters or sounds,” – used to sing Polad Bulbul ogly .

Well, if we understand a “word” as a set of some elements that has a certain meaning, then, indeed, neither letters nor sounds are mandatory. Well, there is Morse code, semaphore alphabet, smoke and fire signals , knot letter finally numbers. And the type of languages, which we are talking about below, does not have letters and in general does not have any graphics, but there are sounds, and all of them are whistling, and not just some consonants. It is not readable, but it sounds, and how! Let’s talk about whistling tongues .

Canary Islands

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On an island named Homera there is a language Silbo Homero or el silbo , which simply means “whistling”.

Tourists from different countries are brought to a restaurant and demonstrated how “whistling” sounds from the lips of native speakers – silbadors . But not only. So the melody and rhythm of have not only the words of Spanish, but also of any other language, local virtuosos will whistle the French “merci” as “fufi” and “good afternoon” as “FIOFIFIFE” .

Mineral water bottle turns in “fyufifya fyifyafyafya fyofi”

Canary and canary whistle across the hall like canaries.

But this is not only a lure and entertainment for foreign tourists, this “bird language” is a masterpiece of cultural heritage UNESCO , studied in local schools, and even used in practice among the mountains and hills, where it actually originated.

The practical meaning of this trill for high landscapes is rather mundane – to invite someone to your place, to report danger, to ask for help, to announce one’s presence. As long as you can not shout through the longitude and height of the local relief, you can whistle, and in this we will not whistle you.

True, the cellular communication that has reached these places makes the “nightingale code” somewhat redundant. And it is all the more important to preserve this tradition and let it whistle like a bullet in the air and disappear.

Turkey

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Canarians are not alone in this world who have developed a system of whistling.

Turks in the village Kushköy also whistle to each other from hill to hill.

Their language is called Kush Dili and belongs to a variety of the Turkish language, that is, to the Turkic group, while Silbo Homero belongs to the Romance.

And yes, Kush Dili is also on the UNESCO list.

Just whistle – he will appear

Whistling tongues are obviously not intended for long philosophical conversations, but calling someone to check if everything is in order is easy! Or ask a neighbor on the opposite mountain if he can visit in the evening or not.

The functions of the Turkic whistle are the same as those of the Canarian – to call, ask, to “talk” about something, about the number of bags needed, for example. Both whistling languages ​​arose as a result of the same needs of the inhabitants of different regions with a similar landscape. No one “whistled” this idea from anyone.

And the problem of preservation is equally acute in both languages.

Although, “both” is not entirely accurate, because whistling, if not of the entire language, but of a certain lexicon, is present in the Yoruba languages ​​, Pirahana it is they who communicate by whistling.

The inhabitants of the islands of La Gomera and El Hierro in the Canary archipelago communicate with each other by whistling. Both islands are full of cliffs and steep slopes. Echoes in the mountains distort loud sounds, making it difficult to call each other, but whistling is ideal for sending messages over long distances. Silbo Homero – this is the name of this language – at the end of the 20th century was on the verge of extinction. The local authorities have solved the problem – now the whistle is taught in schools. Who came up with this unusual language? Why are they interested in intelligence agencies? And what other nations communicate by whistling? 9 talks about it0095 program “Mysteries of Humanity” with Oleg Shishkin on REN TV.

Silbo Gomero

Whistling is known to be a bad omen, but not on the island of Gomera. About 22 thousand people live here. On the neighboring island of Hierro, there are almost 11,000 more. In addition to traditional Spanish, all of these people can communicate using whistles. From a scientific point of view, Silbo Homero cannot be called an independent language; rather, it is a Spanish speech transposed into a whistle.

Photo: © Screenshot of video

Linguists still cannot answer the question of how the whistling language appeared, which the inhabitants of the islands communicate with. Blogger Ksenia Ilyinykh, the author of a documentary about the Canary Islands, believes that the Silbo language was invented by aborigines – the Guanches tribe.

“At the beginning of the 15th century, the Spaniards captured this island, and the Guanches, the locals, were already whistling to each other from one end of the ravine to the other. The Spaniards created a kind of hybrid of the Spanish language and the Guanche language. And still the locals whistle each other friend” , – said Ksenia Ilinykh.

Popularity of the language

Over time, this tradition began to annoy the colonists. In 1882, the mayor of the island’s capital, San Sebastian de la Gomera, banned Christmas services from churches. And all because the parishioners stubbornly continued not to hum psalms, but to whistle. And in 1906, the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII himself, granted the island of Gomera. He did not believe in the stories that the locals speak bird language, and decided to see for himself. The Monarch liked the language of Silbo.

Photo: © Video screenshot

“It was popular until the middle of the 20th century, but then it began to lose its significance, because it was perceived as the language of uneducated peasants. Gradually, people began to lose this language, and by the 70s it was almost gone out of use. By the 90s, according to various estimates, there were about 50 people who still knew how to whistle “, – shared the candidate of philological sciences Alexander Pipersky.

The use of “bird language”

Modern technology has also played its role – why whistle when you can make a phone call? But in the middle of 9In the 1900s, the inhabitants of the island realized that a unique tradition was leaving their lives, which must be preserved. Since the late 90s, silbo homero has been taught in schools to children from the age of 11. The ability to communicate by whistling helps many islanders earn a living.

Photo: © Screenshot of video

“They attract tourists, especially in restaurants. Naturally, everyone applauds, clap, film it all on camera” , – the blogger noted.

It is not easy to learn the whistling language. There are six basic whistling techniques where one or more fingers are placed in the mouth. Especially advanced ones give out trills without the help of hands, resting their tongue against the palate.

In recent years, the Silbo Homero language has been adopted by representatives of the Spanish secret services. Communication with a whistle will help them negotiate in hard-to-reach mountainous areas where radio communication does not work. After all, the whistle is heard at a distance of up to 14 kilometers.

“The height of the whistle conveys vowels, and all the peculiarities of tone movement – up, down, intermittent – convey consonants. Any Spanish sentence can be reproduced in this language. It is clear that with some losses, therefore, of course, a lot depends on understanding here context” , the philologist explained.

“Bird Tongue” still helps the islanders in emergency situations. Two years ago, in the south of Gomera, at a fishing base, one of the workers badly injured his hand. A doctor was urgently needed, but no one at the base had a telephone. But after a few minutes, information about the victim reached the doctor, who was in the clinic 14 kilometers away. Five inhabitants of the island in a chain handed it over with a whistle.

Where else is whistling language

“Earlier it was believed that this island is the only place where the whistling language exists. But it is not so. It is found in some African countries, in Mexico, Greece, Brazil and many other places” , – said Ilyinykh.

Sefiriya is a whistling language spoken by the farmers and shepherds of the village of Antia on the Greek island of Euboea. In 2018, only six people remained alive who know Sefirian.

Photo: © Video screenshot

In Mexico, whistling is used to communicate in the market, and only men have the right to speak in this way. And among the Vietnamese Hmong people, the whistling language is used for flirting. Young men whistle poems on it when they want to attract the attention of girls.

“There are whistling languages ​​in Alaska, so this is a fairly common phenomenon. It would be interesting, in fact, to understand how they interact with ordinary sound languages, did they appear earlier or later than these languages, where could they come from, originated are they once on the planet, or have they appeared independently several times,” , Piperski says.

You can learn about the incredible events of history and the present, about amazing inventions and phenomena in the program “Mysteries of Humanity” with Oleg Shishkin on REN TV.

HOMERIC WHISTLE. Silbo Gomera and others

HOMERIC WHISTLE

Homeric whistle

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A real sensation in the world of linguists and ethnographers was the study and even the “secondary discovery” of the already well-known “Homer’s silbo” of the Canary Islands. In 1957, Andre Klass, a teacher of phonetics at the University of Glasgow, spent three months with his wife comprehending the “basics” of this unusual language (Klass is now considered a recognized authority in the study of whistling languages). As the researcher noted, whistlers from Fr. Homer change the pitch with the help of the tongue, leaving the lips and fingers motionless. “The natives,” he wrote, “press the tip of the tongue to their lips and at the same time try to articulate the words as in normal speech. They can whistle everything they say in Spanish quite clearly.” However, outside the context of speech, some individual “words” may not be understood. During a long conversation, the interlocutors often make mistakes and the phrase has to be repeated several times. Errors can be caused by changes in pitch without variation in its timbre.

Further, it turned out that “Homer’s silbo” has a number of amazing features. First of all, the whistle of the Homers is unusually strong – in the local technique of performance, it sometimes spreads over … fourteen kilometers. In its own way, a record in this way of exchanging information! One of the travelers who visited the Canary Islands at the beginning of the 20th century told a local anecdote about some incredulous Englishman who asked a Homer to test the strength of the sound by whistling in his ear. As a result, they say, he became deaf for two weeks. And there is nothing surprising in this story!

In order to better understand the power of the “Homeric whistle”, it would be appropriate to give the following explanation. The power of the whistle of the Pyrenean highlanders from Aas, and they whistle “only” 2-3 kilometers, at a distance of one meter from the “whistle”, is, as noted by the sound counter, 110 decibels. What it is? A decibel is a unit of sound or noise power: 40 decibels is a normal conversation, 80 decibels is a sound that is difficult to bear, 120 decibels is a sound that can injure the brain … Indeed, the Pyrenean highlanders or the inhabitants of Homer’s island could measure themselves with the legendary Nightingale the Robber of Russian epics , in the image of which, perhaps, some vague memories of the “whistling” forest tribes that once lived in the Murom forests in Russia were also reflected. Who knows?

But let’s get acquainted with the testimony of an eyewitness who lived for some time on the island of Homer, in order to find out in more detail about the champions in such an unusual way of communication. Says Erich Wustman, a famous ethnographer and traveler from the GDR:

– Before you have time to go ashore, you already hear a lot about the language of whistling, – one of his acquaintances prophesied to the traveler in Las Palmas, the capital of the island of Gran Canaria, the most famous of the group Canary Islands. According to her, she knew Homer’s island well and was always surprised by the phenomenon of his whistling language. She also told the traveler that the coast of the island is so steep that new arrivals are lifted directly from the deck of the ship in a special cradle.

“To be honest,” writes Wustman, “we landed without a crane, and apparently it never occurred to anyone to inform the islanders of our arrival with the legendary “Homeric whistle.” Two taciturn islanders shouldered our suitcases, and we walked on foot to San Sebastian, the main city of La Gomera. But, according to the reports of travelers who visited the islands, everyone whistles on Homer – from young to old. Moreover, on the island, even the birds imitate the whistling conversation of people.

Indeed, this is a correct observation. Once in the mountains of Gomera, in the forest, the Klass spouses, who were studying the whistling language of the islanders, heard Spanish names whistling: “Felippe! Federico! Alfonso!” And for many miles, as it turned out, there was not a single living soul. The perplexed Klass did find the whistlers, blackbirds, songbirds from the “mockingbird” family, which perfectly imitated the human names they often heard in the forest.

As Wustman later found out, even the old Spanish and Portuguese chronicles of the discoverers (and the Canary Islands were discovered several times, starting from ancient times!) , and other Canary Islands in a moment of danger. According to local legends, each page of the history of the island was transmitted by means of a whistling language high into the mountains and from there again reached the farthest bays on the shores of Gomera.

The ancient inhabitants of the islands, the kind, blue-eyed giants of the Guanches, communicated with the help of the whistle language, fighting off heavily armed detachments of the Spaniards until they were completely exterminated, and the details of this tragedy were carried by the echo of the whistle to all corners of the island. It is said that with the help of the language of whistling, the rebellious islanders agreed on a joint action when they rebelled against the heavy exactions and ferocity of the Spanish conquistador governors; the men of the island, apparently already speaking Spanish, were whistled when the ships of the daring pirate Drake tried to attack the capital of the island, the city of San Sebastian.

A few years later, the islanders again whistled the alarm when the ships of the Dutch Gueuses decided to strike back at the Spaniards, avenging the burnt cities and villages of Flanders. The alarm whistle “prepare for battle!”, “To arms!” resounded over Homer when, in the 17th century, Algerian corsairs, having landed in the bay of San Sebastian, set fire to the captured city from several sides. A sad whistle accompanied the pirate ships for a long time, carrying to the slave markets of the Maghreb the last of the surviving blue-eyed and fair-haired Guanches, highly valued by slave traders … And during the Spanish Civil War, the Canary Republicans, fighting off the “brown landing”, went into the mountains with machine guns and took here is your last stand on the impregnable Rock Agandos. By whistling they received the necessary information and by whistling they warned their supporters on the island that they were forced to surrender, since they did not have a drop of water left for the wounded …

One of the most popular folk legends on the island of Gomera ascribes the invention of the whistling language to criminals and captives exiled here by the Spaniards in the Middle Ages. As if, according to the then manner of treating prisoners of war, their tongues were cut off in order to exclude the possibility of their conspiracy and escape from the island. And that these unfortunates, in order to understand each other, created their own original language of whistling.

Now it is difficult to establish whether there is some truth in the ancient legend of the Canary Islands, but one thing is certain – the whistling language existed here long before the arrival of the Spaniards and the first conqueror of the Canaries, the Norman Jean de Bethencourt, who annexed the islands to the kingdom of Henry III of Castile. The learned monks who were with him on the campaign, according to the words of the islanders, wrote down this strange legend: “Homer is the birthplace of tall people who are fluent in the most wonderful of all languages. They speak with lips as if they had no tongue at all.

These people have a legend that they were not guilty of anything and were severely punished by the king, who ordered them to cut out their tongues. Judging by the way they talk, this legend can be trusted.” Another Spanish chronicler cites a different version of the legend: “They say that the people from the Canary Islands are the descendants of African tribes who rebelled against the Romans and killed the judge. As punishment, they were not executed, but their tongues were pulled out. Having neither pens nor papers, they could not pass on to their descendants the story of their rebellion. The poor fellows were thrown into boats without oars and left to their fate. The boat was washed up on the islands, where they were forced to settle … “

The legend of the “tongueless people” given by the German traveler and the Spanish chroniclers is unlikely to explain the appearance of the whistling language in the Canary Islands, although it probably contains some grain of truth – in a very distorted form. One thing is clear, that without a tongue a person cannot whistle, as the inhabitants of Homera do, for the tongue plays an important, if not the main role in whistling. “Tongue and teeth – that’s what forms the whistling phrases” Homer’s silbo “and in a similar whistling conversation of the Pyrenean highlanders!” – says one of the researchers of whistle languages, the French scientist Rene-Guy Busnel. Having resorted to X-rays and filming, he found, for example, that in most cases a whistling person fixes the middle part of the tongue, freely moving its tip, and it is he who basically forms the phrases of a whistling conversation.

Thus, if this was actually the case, and which is very doubtful, by depriving the prisoners of their language, they were made absolutely dumb. There can be no talk of any “invention” of the whistling language here. At best, this legend contains some vague information, dating back to ancient times, that the first conquerors who put things in order on the islands decided to protect themselves by using a similar “surgical operation” against the recalcitrant islanders, faced with an already existing whistling tongue. However, more than one generation of linguists and ethnographers has been struggling with this riddle, connected with the emergence of the whistling language in the Canary Islands and the legends explaining its appearance…

Some authors write that only the old islanders speak the language of whistling in Homer, and the youth, they say, have not understood it for a long time. This is not entirely true, as Woostman saw firsthand. Of course, the language of whistling, as elsewhere with the development of modern means of communication (radio, telephone), gradually lost and is losing its significance as the only way to communicate over considerable distances – Homer has radio, mail, and telephone – but here it is still everyone whistles: from small to large. True, the majority, nevertheless, having a good understanding of the language of whistling, are no longer able to speak it fluently, tolerably respond to “Homer’s silbo”. And, apparently, in the near future, this mysterious relic of bygone times will disappear completely …

Wustman was told about all this by the Homers, with whom he quickly became friends, showing great interest in the local whistled language (which, of course, the islanders could not help but be proud of!). With them, the traveler went to the mountains more than once, always making sure that the “Homeric whistle” had time to warn the islanders of his arrival.

Usually they do this, the Homers explained to him: they take the most skillful whistler and he whistles everything that needs to be told to the neighbors through the gorges and abysses that abound in the relief of the island. Perhaps that is why the language of whistling arose here, since it was born of an urgent need. After all, Gomera is a small island, obviously of volcanic origin, which is inhabited by about 35 thousand people; there is only one road on the island and many impassable “goat paths”, and the whole of it is cut up and down by wide and steep gorges, along the bottom of which roaring streams of water run. They are so noisy that they even drown out human voices, and in order to get to a friend on the other side of the gorge and talk to him, informing him of the latest news, it is better to whistle all this to him than to climb steep cliffs for hours. Not surprisingly, even today, the Homerians prefer not to storm the gorges, not to scream, tearing their throats in the hope of drowning out the roaring stream, and not to call the phone – this 20th century luxury item on the island – but to communicate using the language of whistles. In a word, the mountainous relief of the island itself and the excellent acoustics of the gorges contribute to its preservation among the islanders, but, in addition, as the researchers noted, the Spanish language, perhaps more than any other amenable to the “Homeric whistle”. Equally important is the very good hearing of the islanders, healthy teeth, which, as one of the travelers writes, “is also important, since this allows them to make sounds that are more like the whistle of steam than human breathing.”

To see for himself the effectiveness of the whistling language, Woostman did a simple experiment. One of the Gomers went far into the mountains, while the other stayed with him and translated everything the traveler told him into a whistle. The following dialogue took place:

— Oh, Evaristo! (That was the name of the second Gomer).

— Oh, what? came the reply.

Then I strained, Wustman writes, and, straining all my imagination, came up with a task, and my guide, Jorge, whistled it:

– Oh, Evaristo, take off your shoes, climb a palm tree and drop a couple of nuts for our guest,

Evaristo, without hesitation, did everything exactly – for this he did not even have to look through the binoculars, which Woostman had prudently brought with him : the air was clean and transparent. They vied with each other to come up with requests, one more absurd than the other, and a Gomerian a few kilometers from the “experimenters” strictly carried out the tasks. It was clear that he understood every word. Jorge whistled without putting his fingers in his mouth, as we usually do when they want to whistle louder. “The whistle, however, turns out to be somewhat weaker, but it is heard much more clearly,” Jorge explained. Since the mountain air is rarefied and, besides, the echo helps, the strength of the whistle is quite enough for negotiations at a fair distance. “We, by the way,” writes Woostman, “have found that the language of the whistle is more difficult to understand for a person standing next to the“ whistler ”than for several kilometers away from him.”

Wustman was finally convinced of the universality of the whistling language by a little experience. One of his acquaintances from Homer Island whistled him a phrase in the local “silbo”, and he recorded it on a tape recorder. After that, the film was played in turn to two Homers in different parts of the island. Both translated in the same way: “I would like to visit Germany at least once…”

Somewhere in the early 60s, the famous English writer and traveler Lawrence Green visited the Canary Islands. In his book “Islands untouched by time” (it came out with us at 1972) he gives a lot of interesting information about the whistle language in the Canary Islands. In particular, he writes, referring to the opinion of linguists who traveled on the island, that once the whistling language, before the Spanish conquest of the islands in the XIV-XV centuries, was much more widespread in the archipelago. He met on the island of Tenerife, on the island of Hierro – the most western and remote of the Canary Islands (the author himself also met him here) – and, apparently, on other islands. Lawrence Green, like Erich Wustman, also noted that many of the islanders speak the whistling language in the Canaries. In his opinion, this is not a lost art, but a generally accepted manner of speaking, and even small children own it, as he was convinced by doing, like any visitor, several experiments with adults and children.

The language of whistling, according to his stories, is still used on Homer for purely practical purposes. Thus, in the lower part of the city there is a pumping station that supplies water up to the tomato and banana plantations, and since the supply of water is accompanied by a number of complex operations, a real connection is maintained between the plateau and the pumping station using the whistle language. Further, one should not be surprised to hear lively and attractive, like the singing of a nightingale, the sounds of a whistle exchanged between a waitress in a cafe and a cook in the kitchen. So she whistles every order, every dish – from potato soup to pancakes with sauce. She can even tell you how the eggs should be cooked – soft or hard boiled, what kind of wine or coffee should be served. Moreover, as Green ironically, “when it comes to sweets, the whistle becomes, in my opinion, more melodic.” On the island, parents speak the language of whistling to their children, and even every child under the age of one raises its head, responding to its name. And any person can be recognized by whistling, as well as by voice, because each Homer whistles in his own way, individually …

It happens that a car breaks down somewhere along the way, and the driver whistles to someone, and he whistles further until the message reaches the nearest garage and technical assistance is sent to him. Fishermen whistle from boat to boat, reporting on schools of tuna, which the local waters have been famous for since the days of Carthage. And on ships unloading in the port, instead of the usual “main-vira”, a piercing whistle is heard. Since there is not a telephone everywhere on Homer, the whistling of the inhabitants of the island over the years, says Green, saved many people who urgently needed medical attention. So, when a doctor was urgently needed at the Kantera fishing base, which is located in the south of Gomera, alarm whistles were heard, and six minutes later the doctor in San Sebastian, the capital of the island, already knew about the accident – moreover, he was even told the symptoms of the disease: five men of Gomer, fishermen and shepherds, transmitted this message over a distance of more than nine miles. But the base was located in a bay, separated from the rest of the island by gorges and rocks, where it was impossible to bring a telephone line.

Lawrence Green was told two comical stories about the practice of Homer’s silbo by the locals. One of them told about a local rich farmer who lived on the island half a century ago. The sharecroppers who worked on his plantations often deceived the owner, but they always had time to warn them with a “Homeric whistle” as soon as he went to check on his farms. Finally, the angry owner took lessons in the language of whistling and, on his next visit, managed, listening to the whistle, to compile a complete list of pigs and cows, goats and sheep hidden from him by the shepherds.

And the most famous demonstration of the whistling language on the island, according to the Homers, was in 1906, organized for the Spanish king Alfonso III. The incredulous monarch was dubious about reports of the local “silbo”, and two Gomer soldiers tried to convince him of the opposite. At the same time, here the Homerians roll with laughter, they in a hurry made one mistake: the soldier who was standing next to the king was instructed to take off his hat with a whistle, but did not understand his comrade and … pulled off the hat from the king himself. As a reward (for a whistle or for a hat?), the king freed the soldiers from military service …

For a beginner, linguists unfamiliar with the phenomenon of the whistling language say, all words in it sound the same, like one continuous vowel, but people who speak it can easily decipher the most complex phrases. The whistling language of the Homerians has its own peculiarities and conventions – after all, it is the language of whistling, and not pure “conversation”. For example, for some reason you can’t just whistle “January”, “February”, “March”, but you must definitely add the word “month”. Apparently, this is due to the fact that when transmitting a phrase over a long distance, when fingers are put into the mouth to get a sufficiently powerful whistle, the speech organs are partially constrained and the phrase in “Homer’s silbo” sounds illegible. For this, it is necessary to whistle some “key phrase” or a word most often used, for example, a month. Lip whistle, the researchers noted, is used on Homer only when transmitting messages over short distances: the sound is not very strong, but more legible. The islanders assured Lawrence Green that when whistling over a long distance, it is necessary to put a bent finger of the right hand to the tongue, and make a funnel around the mouth with the left. The sound is strong and far audible.

Researchers who have studied “Homer’s silbo” have made the most thorough analysis of this whistling language, which they consider “whistle Spanish” (or “whistled dialect of Spanish”). Unfortunately, it is rather difficult to give a popular presentation of their phonetic-linguistic conclusions, due to the complexity of linguistic terminology, since they are of a purely scientific, narrowly specialized nature, understandable only to professionals. However, researchers believe that getting a whistle in “Homer’s silbo” is much easier than forming normal conversational speech. In their opinion, the development and preservation of the local whistling language on the island of Homer is facilitated not only by the isolated position of the island with a peculiar, rugged relief, but also by the Homeric dialect of the Spanish language itself with its extremely simple phonetic system containing relatively few different vowels and consonants ( at the same time, voiced sounds do not participate in the formation of a whistle).

The limited meaning of the transmitted messages, stress, rhythm and intonation of whistling phrases, “key words”, having heard which the partner understands approximately what the message will be about, is also important in “Homer’s silbo”. By the way, according to linguists, this indicates that Homer’s “silbo” is degrading and actively falling into disuse. Probably, before it was possible to talk about anything, although even then there were certain limitations in the language of whistling: it was possible, apparently, to convey specific information (and not abstract concepts), that is, to conduct a conversation on “abstract topics”.

Naturally, the tongue, lips, teeth, and fingers play the most active role in the formation of the whistling language. Their various positions and combinations make it possible to build certain whistling phrases on Homer’s silbo. In this case, the oral cavity, bronchi and lungs act as a kind of resonator that amplifies the sound. “In ordinary colloquial speech,” one of the researchers of Homer’s “silbo” wrote, “we distinguish the constructions of words and phrases, and not individual sounds, most of which are not perceived clearly, in “silbo”, on the contrary, everything is audible, everything is legible … » According to another linguist, the indistinctness of ordinary speech when talking over long distances is associated with the loss of weak harmonic and non-stationary complex speech waves, while a whistling message, the meaning of which does not depend on timbre, but is entirely determined by the pitch, will be clearly understood within the whole conversation. That is why “silbo” has become a convenient system of long-distance communication among some peoples of the globe.

It is difficult to say why the Canary Islands did not invent something more suitable: like African drums – tom-toms or slotted “talking” drums – tuddukats, which are still preserved in Africa and Melanesia. Maybe they were simply “not thought of” here (although there are tom-toms in West Africa, there is also a whistling language) and the whistling languages ​​of the world are actually the most ancient remote “intercom” that is “always with you”? Older than any other mechanical device for transmitting messages over long distances…

It is interesting to compare the “language” of the slit tuddukat drums known to ethnographers from the island of Mentaway (Indonesia) with the whistling information transmission system. Thus, the inhabitants of the island believe that tuddukat signals sound to them like ordinary speech, and not like sets of conventional signs conveying a particular message. Indeed, Mentaway’s drums are tuned to transmit individual sounds of human speech, despite the fact that Mentaway is not a tonal language. Here’s how it works in practice: each drum is associated with certain vowels: 1st – with i, u, ui; 2nd – with e, o, ei, eu, oi; 3rd – with a, ai, au, etc. Separately pronounced, following one after another, vowels correspond to only one drum beat. So, for example, the word “maruei” (quickly) is conveyed by drum beats 3-1-2, which corresponds to the vowels in the syllables “ma-ru-ei”. Texts that should be transmitted to a neighboring village are compiled and rhythmized by the Mentavians in advance, adapting to the tonality of such an unusual “telegraph”, which, really, is the pinnacle of the development of a drum information transmission system. She, according to researchers, stands completely apart in Asia and Oceania and is not found anywhere else. Scientists attribute its origin to the Neolithic of these regions of the world, when such an amazing art of the “drum language” was born, somewhat reminiscent of the “silbo” systems among other peoples of the world …

Or maybe just the opposite: the language of whistling originated from the language of drums and other sounding devices, being a higher stage in the development of means of information exchange? Unfortunately, the comparison of whistling languages ​​in the most diverse regions of the world with the language of drums in the same regions of the world has not been carried out by any of the linguists. Perhaps this comparison contains the secret of their origin, the pedigree of each of them, the connection with each other, the answer to the question: what is next – a whistle or a meaningful drum signal?…

how to learn the most difficult languages ​​in the world

Interesting ideas /
Incredible Facts

Learning Japanese and complaining about three different alphabets? Have you started English? Good luck! Every language has its own difficulties. However, our five is real hardcore…

Place No. 5. Archa is a language with 1.5 million verb endings

There are three different verb endings in English. Namely: -ing, -ed and -s. Until everything is clear? Excellent. In the Archa language, the language of the indigenous people of southwestern Russia, there are 1,502,839 verb endings. Think about it for a moment – a native Archin speaker can send you in more ways than there are words in the Oxford Dictionary.

In addition to the tense form, the Archa language has many verb modifiers for gender (there are four in the language, they are progressive), case, number, and a lot of grammatical nuances that are not in English.

Therefore, saying, for example, “He farted”, a native speaker of Archi can say who exactly did it, when, how many there were, express the degree of confidence that this particular action took place, how loud it was, describe the conditions under which this incident happened and even how bad the smell was all accompanied by – and all this, just a slight change in the verb. Therefore, by the time you can figure out how to say in Archin so that the villain stops spoiling the air in the car, there is a high probability that everyone in this very car will have time to be poisoned by methane.

Place No. 4. Silbo Homero – whistling language

Silbo Homero is spoken by the people of the Canary Islands and is the easiest language on our list. Its “alphabet” consists of only two vowels and four consonants. We have finally found a culture that values ​​simplicity! However, if you want to speak it, you’ll need keen ears and incredible breath control, as silbo homero is a language that is articulated entirely by whistling.

The modern language is a variation of the language of the African tribes that once inhabited the island. The Canary Islands fell under the rule of the Spaniards, who practically wiped out the local population, since imperialism was planted in this way. However, the Spanish settlers were fascinated by the unique way of communication of the local population and adapted it to their native language and still take it seriously – whistling is a compulsory part of the school curriculum.

Silbo gomero is a complex enough language with its own nuances that whistling can be used to convey news and holiday announcements over long distances. The local farmers of the islands could hear the skilled whistler from two miles away, which was perfect for the region’s mountainous terrain. If you are working at the top of a ravine and suddenly notice a rake trailing behind your wife, who is a mile away from you, you can explain in detail, but at the same time very melodiously, how you will kick his ass.

Place No. 3. Khong is a click language with 122 consonants

Khong is spoken by about 3,000 natives of Namibia and Botswana in Africa. While speakers of English and other European languages ​​use only 26 letters, the Khong language has 122 consonants alone. This is because this language uses many more sounds than others.

It is similar in pronunciation to Chinese, if it were spoken while chewing gum and playing ping-pong. However, all those smacking, clicking and crackling sounds have many meanings. There is no written alphabet, and most sounds don’t even have a rough equivalent in our language, so linguists have to resort to all sorts of fancy symbols to transcribe what they hear.

Linguists claim that Khong, or its equivalent, may be the oldest language in the world. When we immigrated from Africa, our way of communicating changed radically and almost all of the ancient clicks were lost.

Seat #2 The Pawnee, a language where words are put together like in LEGO

The Pawnee, a tribe of Native Americans from central Oklahoma, speaks a polysynthetic language in which words are formed by gluing different components together in this way that a complete, complex thought can be expressed in a single, carefully supplemented word. For example, “Hatkaahuhtiirahpuh” means “to dig a small trench or ditch around the perimeter of a dwelling to prevent water from seeping in, or around the perimeter of a yard to avoid a drain.”

Seat #1. Tuyuka is a language with 140 genders

Eh, Tuyuka is the head of linguistics. An endangered language spoken by native Colombians. Tuyuka is probably the most difficult language on earth. It combines the most difficult aspects of other languages, turning into a Megazord of linguistic pranks. Like pawns, it is polysynthetic and consists of carefully crafted words created by gluing together smaller word fragments – for example, “hóabãsiriga” – I can’t write.

According to some estimates, there are 140 births in Tuyuk. In this case, “gender” in linguistics refers to the sound that defines the noun. In most languages, the only noun modifiers are masculine and feminine. In Tuyuk, this concept has turned into a whole linguistic sea. For example, they have a genus for “bark that does not adhere tightly to a tree”, which can be used to literally describe bark or …. wide pants.

In addition, as in Archa, there are many verbal modifiers in Tuyuk. This is the so-called justification construction, i.e. every time you report an event, you must specify how you learned about it. For example, the ending -wi means “you knew about it because you saw it yourself”, and the ending -hiyi means “I think so.”

Well, what language should we start learning from?

Author: Elena Mishina

Based on materials: www. cracked.com

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Unusual whistling Homero language! Whistle language

Image caption

At a school on Gomera, whistling lessons are compulsory for everyone

One of the most unusual languages ​​in the world is now experiencing a revival in the Canary Islands.

This is the whistling language of Silbo Homero, named after the islands of Gomera, which belong to the archipelago of the Canary Islands.

I am standing on top of a hill overlooking the old peasant houses. To my right is a view of a forest burned last year when this Spanish island, off the coast of Morocco, was engulfed in forest fires.

I listen, trying to make out the sounds of the whistle, which the old-timers assure me are still used by the locals.

This ancient language, in which words in Spanish are replaced by four consonants and two vowels, is perfectly suited for communication between shepherds grazing sheep in rugged ravines. They say that it can be heard for more than three kilometers.

In a moment of danger

Nothing is known about its origin. The first European settlers who arrived on the island in the 15th century found the Guanches there, who already used the whistle to communicate over long distances.

Gradually, the locals switched to Spanish when whistling, although it is known that in North Africa, where the Guanches came from, whistling languages ​​were common among many nationalities.

The whistling language was especially widely used in the 40s and 50s of the last century.

“In the old days, when fires started in the mountains, which often happens on the island, we were all evacuated by the police,” says Lion Rodriguez, an old man with a hoarse voice of a smoker.

According to him, no one asked the people, but they were simply put on trucks and taken to the city while the fire was being put out.

And the shepherds whistled among themselves, warning about the danger – they say, the police left, we must hide. No one, except for the shepherds and some local residents, understood this language. The news of the danger spread throughout the island very quickly.

I love nature, I love animals and I love to whistle Isidoro the shepherd

The whistling language began to decline in the late 1950s, when, due to the economic crisis, many speakers – or silbadors, as they were called in Spanish – emigrated to Venezuela and nearby Tenerife.

But the rapid development, first of the road network, and then of mobile networks, led to the fact that the Silbo Homero language lost its practical value.

By the end of the 90s, interest in this language began to revive, although many islanders treated it with disdain, considering it the language of poor peasants.

Second wind

Image caption

The island is slowly emptying as its inhabitants move in search of work in Tenerife

However, it was then that it was decided to introduce the language of whistling into the curriculum of local primary schools.

I must say that I did not manage to hear a whistle during many hours of travel on this volcanic island with its very diverse topography. It has become a tourist attraction and can only be heard in schools and during performances in hotels and restaurants.

Archaeologist Fernandez Marrero fears that the whistling language may become an exotic curiosity, like the flower necklaces worn around the necks of tourists in the Hawaiian Islands.

Whistle languages ​​around the world

• Whistle languages ​​used in Greece, Turkey, Mexico and some African countries
• The Shona language of Zimbabwe and Zambia contains whistling sounds
• Most often used by shepherds in mountainous and rough terrain
• Robot R2-D2 from Star Wars was also explained in this language

Examples of other languages ​​of this type are known – for example, on the Greek island of Evia, in the city of Cuzkoy in Turkey, and also in the French Pyrenees.

But Silbo Gomero is the only language that is well studied and taught in schools, and therefore used by hundreds of people. For some inhabitants of the island of Homer, language has become a source of income, others consider it an important element of national identity, but for the linguist Martial Morer, it is interesting in itself.

“Silbo is interesting from a linguistic point of view, because he is a very simple system and you can use his example to understand how other languages ​​were formed,” he says.

I met one of these silbadors in the town of Chipude, high in the mountains. 39-year-old Isidoro did not learn this language at school, but inherited it from his father. He herds goats in the local mountains and summons them with his whistle. According to him, goats respond only to his voice.

Shiro, as his friends call him, lives alone. All his relatives left for Tenerife, because there was no work for them on their native island.

“I myself lived there for eight years, but decided to return. I never got used to city life – I love nature, I love animals and I love to whistle. I will stay here because the island needs me,” says the shepherd.

In 1935, in Paris, a memorandum received from French West Africa was sent from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the General Staff. In it, the governor of the colony reported on an amazing phenomenon. It turns out that the Gurunsi-Nankanse tribes roaming the savannahs of Western Sudan, in addition to the usual language, also use the whistle language, in which they not only transmit messages over a distance of several kilometers, but even conduct long negotiations and at the same time understand each other perfectly. If the weather deteriorates, and with it the “conductivity of the environment” deteriorates, they use “uva”, a strange flute that makes sharp sounds, instead of their own whistle. The governor believed that the military should take a closer look at this phenomenon and, perhaps, introduce a “secret language” into the French army in order to openly transmit secret messages incomprehensible to the uninitiated with its help. It must be that in the French General Staff the note was simply brushed into the wastebasket: what a secret language of whistling, they are out there in the wilderness, among the primitive tribes, they have gone completely crazy!

But these staff officers would have been surprised if they knew that at least a few people who knew the whistling language had always served in the French army. For example, the notorious Charles de Batz Senor d’Artagnan. After all, there, on the slopes of the French Pyrenees, where he was born, the language of whistling has long been in use. So the lieutenant of the royal musketeers could well own it.

And of course, the General Staff could not even imagine that in some six or seven years, when German troops occupy most of the country, the whistling language will help the Maquis, the French partisans, to beat the invaders.

Strange as it may seem, the whistling language is not such a rare phenomenon on the globe. Today it has been established that it is whistled not only in the African savannahs and on the slopes of the Pyrenees, but also in Nepal and Mexico. He is also familiar in Kashmir – the “people of long-livers” Hunza. And all these whistles have such a long history that it is impossible to establish exactly when they appeared. Here, for example, in the northeast of Asia Minor in the East Pontic Mountains is the Turkish village of Kushkei. The name already speaks for itself: the Turkic “kush” means “bird”, and “key” means “song”, “melody”. From generation to generation, the language of whistling is passed down here, and no one can say when they “whistled” for the first time. Even old people, when they are asked this question, look into the distance and wave their hands hopelessly: they say, from the beginning of time!

It is difficult to say about the “beginning of time”, but the fact that in these parts were communicated in this way two and a half thousand years ago, is evidenced by an ancient author.

In “Anabasis” by Xenophon, which tells about the events of 401 BC. e., tribes of highlanders-mossiniks are mentioned, living in wooden “towns” or “towers” and communicating with each other with some kind of signal cries or whistles. And although these “towns” were sometimes at a distance of 80 stages or even more, people understood each other well. Meanwhile, in the ancient Greek stage – from 157 to 185 meters. That is, according to the most conservative estimates, 80 stages – 12 kilometers 560 meters! It is clear that at such a distance one can communicate only by whistling. Xenophon, one of the leaders of the army, saw everything with his own eyes. And then the mossiniks lived exactly where the village of Kushkei is now located.

Yes, peoples came, drove out the native population, then they were expelled by new conquerors, languages ​​changed, but the “technique” of whistling remained, it was simply superimposed on the new language, just like it happened with writing: the Latin script in which they were written Caesar’s decrees, centuries later, perfectly suited the decrees of the first president of the Turkish Republic, Ataturk. Probably, the Kushkeians in many ways repeat the whistling technique of distant Persian tribes, although, it must be admitted, their whistling no longer “takes” 80 stages, at most – four kilometers.

Of all the whistling languages, the one used by the inhabitants of Homer, one of the Canary Islands, is more studied, more studied, and simply more interesting. Its “popularity”, of course, is facilitated by the fact that it is whistled in Spanish, and this language is known to European scientists much better than Turkish, Nepalese, or any dialect of the Yucatan Indians.

Back in 1878, the German ethnographer Kvedenfeld visited the island. He described this phenomenon and called it Homer’s silbo. “Silbo” is Spanish for “whistling”. So you can translate it like this: “the language of the whistle from the island of Homer.” Subsequently, all whistling languages ​​began to be called silbo, while adding the name of the area where it is used

In the time of Quedenfeld and until almost the middle of the last century, Homer was spoken mainly in colloquial Spanish and Silbo. The main occupation then was mountain shepherding. The mountains, cut by gorges, occupy almost the entire island, they are blown by the winds, rivers run along them, waterfalls rustle there, and it is impossible to over-shout this rumble, but it is quite possible to over-whistle. So everyone whistled, from small to large. Travelers testified: on Homer even birds imitate silbo.

But the more the islands became civilized, the less Silbo was spoken, and by the middle of the 20th century. there was even a threat that the language would disappear altogether. But now the Canary Islands have become a place of pilgrimage for tourists, and its gradual revival began.

The Times of London recently reported that from now on, the children of Homer’s Island will learn Silbo, the whistling language used by local shepherds for centuries, in school. Almost forgotten by the 1960s, silbo has become popular again, and the island now has a whistle day every year.”

The Homerians are proud of their unusual language and, accordingly, tell all sorts of stories about it, most often funny.

For example, how back in 1906 their silbo was demonstrated for the first time at the highest level – to the Spanish king Alfonso III. Once, in the presence of the king, they talked about various miracles that happened in the once great Spanish state. Take at least the secrets of the New World! But, alas, he, along with his riddles, no longer belongs to Spain. To which one of the courtiers remarked that there were many miracles in the Old World, in the lands subject to the crown of His Majesty, even now. For example, the amazing language of whistling, which is spoken among themselves by the subjects of His Majesty in the Canaries. The king did not believe. Then they found two Gomer soldiers who were doing military service in Madrid, brought them to the palace. One remained standing near the monarch, the other moved to the far corner of the hall. The king said: “Let him take off his cap.” He whistled an indication, but, apparently, he was mistaken from excitement. His comrade, typing a step, marched through the entire hall and … decisively tore off his hat from the king himself.

Among the working whistling languages, Homeric stands out for its extraordinary sound power. If the signal of a resident of Kushkei can be heard for 4 kilometers, then a Homer – for 14! They say that one Englishman, in order to test the power of sound, asked one silbodero (a person who owns a silbo) to whistle in his ear. He whistled. An inquisitive Englishman was deaf for two weeks.

For comparison, let’s say that when the strength of the whistle of a Bearnese from the French Pyrenees was measured, a meter one meter away from the whistler showed a sound strength of 110 decibels. (Despite the fact that 40 decibels is a normal conversation, 80 decibels – the sound is difficult to bear, 120 decibels – the sound can injure the brain.) So count how many the poor fellow received if the Homer can whistle “further” the bearnian seven times. Involuntarily, you will remember the Nightingale the Robber, from the whistle of which “the domes on the towers crooked, and the knees in the towers crumbled, and that there are little people, everyone is dead.” But what if this “son Odikhmantyevich” was also born by the people’s memory of some kind of silbo of our ancestors, Murom or Chud? ..

Listen from the outside, so all words in Silbo sound like one long vowel. But the silbodero recognizes every word by the slightest vibrations and changes in tone, which are elusive for someone else’s ear.

It is known that in ordinary conversation we distinguish not so much individual sounds as constructions of words and phrases. In silbo, each sound of a word is heard distinctly. According to scientists who dealt with the problems of the acoustics of human speech, “the indistinctness of ordinary speech when talking over long distances is associated with the loss of weak … harmonic and non-stationary complex speech waves, while a whistled message, the meaning of which does not depend on the timbre, but is entirely determined by the pitch , will be clearly understood throughout the conversation. That is why the silbo not only appeared, but also survived as a very convenient long-distance communication system precisely where natural conditions drowned out ordinary conversation.

Therefore, the main thing in silbo is not the timbre, but the pitch. Her sildobodero changes with the help of her tongue, while her lips and fingers remain motionless. They come into action when words need to be formed, the fingers press the tip of the tongue to the lips, and the tongue tries to articulate the words, as in ordinary speech. The whistle language researcher R. Guy-Busnel, a professor from the Laboratory of Acoustic Physiology in Paris, using X-ray filming, established, for example, that in most cases the silbodero fixes the middle part of the tongue and freely moves the tip, which “gives out” whistling words.

Stress, rhythm and intonation of the phrase also play their role, key words that seem to signal what will be discussed. For example, if you want to report some date, you cannot immediately say “May”, first you need “month”, and then “May”. “The month of May”, “the month of March”, “the month of October” – just like that. This is most likely because, when sending a message over a long distance, you have to use your fingers to amplify the whistle and the “words” sound illegible, and a mistake in the date is a serious thing, so the key word is given first. After all, in a normal conversation, we ask again: “June or July? October or November?

There are researchers who believe that the language of whistling is the remnants of what was once the “Esperanto of the Universe”, which the “newcomers” were fluent in. It was they who brought it to Earth, and the Atlanteans were the first to learn it.

A strange incident, which was told by the helmsman Niccoloso da Recco, a Genoese, who was the first European to discover the Canary Islands, surprised the famous J. Boccaccio: “On one of the islands, sailors discovered something so amazing that they did not land on the shore … something white, and it looked like a fortress, and the whole mountain was strewn with rocks. On top of a pointed rock there is a mast of the same size as on a ship, and on it is a yard with a large Latin sail. This sail, blown by the wind, is shaped like an upright shield with a coat of arms, and it deploys quickly. The mast itself then quickly lowers, as in a galley, then straightens up, throws back again and rises again. The sailors traveled around this island and saw from all sides how this miraculous phenomenon was repeated. Confident that they were dealing with some kind of sorcery, they did not dare to go ashore. They saw many other things there, which the named Niccoloso did not want to talk about … “

What is this, today’s reader will say, if not an alien station in action?

However, with the discovery in recent years of several more silbos in different parts of the globe, it is already difficult to say that they all spread from one place.

FB Livingston, a scientist dealing with the problem of the emergence of human speech, came up with an unexpected hypothesis: long before speaking, a person already knew how to sing: vocals became a prerequisite for articulate speech. Some researchers believe that hominids (ape-like human ancestors) were already “singing” – after all, even today chimpanzees often communicate with each other, so to speak, vocally. The American scientist W. Wescott claims that Australopithecus already knew how to whistle (in different parts of the world it is believed that yeti, “wild people”, do not know human speech, but communicate through a whistle). The Neanderthal probably performed ritual songs.

R. Guy-Busnel, known for his work in the field of studying the language of birds and dolphins, one day, quite by accident, came to an amazing discovery. Due to an oversight of the laboratory assistant, sonograms (special paper tapes with recording sounds and their modulations, similar to electrocardiograms) of the voices of dolphins and Silbo masters from Béarn were mixed up. Only with great difficulty was it possible to separate the recordings of dolphin voices from silbo – they were almost identical!

Probably, the explanation that they say whistling languages ​​appeared where natural circumstances required it – rugged terrain, noises drowning out the human voice, etc. – is logically constructed and the most rational. But what if the situation was the opposite: silbo did not arise due to special natural conditions, no, it was the first, original form of human speech. And when colloquial speech appeared, these very conditions helped the whistling language to survive in those places.

Moreover, experts in animal languages ​​admit that, despite the fundamental difference in the neuroanatomy of birds and humans, the signaling system of bird whistling is similar in a number of features to human language (not even with silbo, but with ordinary spoken language!). So you think: are not the languages ​​of whistling, and the singing of birds, and the voices of dolphins the branches of some one, which disappeared in antiquity, a common communication system, a kind of “proto-language”? It is not for nothing that the “golden age” remained in the memory of mankind, when people understood the language of birds and animals. And, although Goethe assures that the angels speak by singing and only the devil whistles, perhaps Adam and Eve, expelled from paradise, met two hundred years later after a long search (according to one version, Adam was thrown from heaven to Ceylon, and Eve to Arabia) , greeted each other with a happy whistle.

Whistling may seem simple, but it can take a lot of practice to find the correct tongue position. You can learn to play one tone, but how about singing the whole song? Although there are different methods, you need to start with the basics.

Steps


Part 1

Setting the mouth and tongue

Flatten your tongue so that it rests on your upper molars on either side of your mouth.
This creates a corridor along the palate. Don’t let air escape to the sides. Forcefully blowing air through this corridor, you will not make a breath noise, but a sharp whistle.

• Place the tongue close to the palate, extending the tip of the tongue towards the front teeth. Place the sides of your tongue on your molars. In this case, the tongue will flatten out, the channel along the palate will narrow, and at the same time a wide gap will form in the front of the mouth, through which air will be pushed.
• Correct positioning is very important here. To make a whistle, you have to blow air out of the tight curve, which in our case is created by the front teeth and tongue. Blowing air higher in relation to the palate makes it even steeper.

• Press your lips tightly against your teeth.
  This reinforces the tight curve in the air passage formed by your front teeth. Resist the urge to stick out your lips, as this will produce a breath sound.

  • Pout your lips as if you are kissing someone and make a small hole in them less than the diameter of a pencil. Your lips should be as if hard, tense and there should be a lot of wrinkles on them – especially on the lower lip. It should move forward a little more than the top.
  • Do not let your tongue touch the top or bottom of your mouth. Instead, it should hang in the mouth against the back of the front teeth.

• Practice breathing without puffing out your cheeks.
  For the whistle, the air must follow the indicated path – it must not linger in your cheeks. They may be slightly retracted as a result of protrusion of the lips. Imagine that you are drinking with a straw – this is how you should look all the time.

  • It must be difficult for you to inhale – this is how small the hole created by your lips should be. You will then be able to control the breath through it, and will be able to do so for longer than if you were talking or singing.

Part 2

Sound shaping

1. Slowly blow the air out of your mouth, experimenting with the position of your tongue.
   Although the air passage along the palate should be short, too little space creates a very noticeable breathing sound. Once you find a balance between these sounds, you can move your tongue back and get different pitches of the whistle.

   • It’s all about the tongue and cheeks. When you “blow” air through your lips, the main problem may be either that you are blowing too hard, or that the shape of your mouth is not quite correct.

2. Adjust volume and pitch.
   The smaller you make your mouth (big “o”) and the more air, the louder the volume, the smaller “o” and less air will make the whistle quieter. It is necessary to collect lips, but not very much; just enough to make the lips form a small “o”.

   • Try to blow; and if there is a sound, move your tongue to find out which position gives the best pitch and sound. The pitch depends on the volume (physical volume) in the cavity you create between the hole formed by the lips and the back of the throat. The smaller it is, the higher the sound will be, respectively, with a smaller cavity, the sound will be lower. In other words, the closer the tongue is to the mouth, the higher the sound produced.

3. Experiment with modulation and pitch position.
   There are many ways to modulate the pitch of the whistle with the tongue: you can swing it back and forth like a reed whistle (it’s actually very similar) or you can bend it up and down to make the space smaller or larger . As you gain experience, you can also use your throat to widen that space and play even lower notes.

   • A vibrato effect is produced by slightly moving the tongue back and forth so that there is a tremor between two notes. As said before, it’s all about the tongue, cheeks and training. If you can whistle, whistle all the time.

Part 3

Finding problems with whistling

1. Experiment with wetting your lips.
   Some people believe that the need to wet the lips to whistle is a myth, others swear it is true. If whistling is difficult for you, try moisturizing your lips. Think of it like wetting your finger before making a sound from the rim of a glass.

   • Wetting does not mean dousing. Lightly moisturize the inside of your lips and keep exercising. If you notice a difference, then this method might work.

2. Try blowing air in instead of blowing it out.
   Some people whistle better when blowing air than when blowing it out. However, for most people it is much more difficult. However, the position of the tongue and mouth will be the same. If the standard method doesn’t work for you, try it.

3. Adjust tongue height.
   When the front of the tongue is behind the teeth, raise or lower it slightly. Has the tone changed? Does one of the tones sound closer to a whistle than the other? Keep changing the position of the very tip of your tongue until you find a tone that you can reproduce.

   • Once you find the correct position for the tip
     tongue, start experimenting with moving the middle part of it. This changes the airflow and hence the altitude. Once you find other pitches, you only need time to figure out which position corresponds to which note.

4. Don’t give up.
   It takes time to master the art of whistling. It can take a long time before you find the right shape for your mouth or how much air to blow out. Before you worry about pitch or volume, focus on getting an even tone.

   • Ask your friends how they do it. You may be surprised as they may have a slightly different technique. The mouth of each person has a slightly different shape and size from the rest, so the fact that we all whistle in different ways is quite logical.

Before visiting the Garajonay National Park, we were brought to the city with a restaurant famous not only for local dishes, but also for demonstrating the legacy of the ancient Guanches – the whistling language.

It is called “silbo” with the obligatory specification “gomero” (Silbo Gomero), since of all the places in the world where such sound transmission is found, it was on this island that whistling was once very widespread and has survived to this day.

The town of Agulo, where we were fed in a restaurant and introduced to Silbo Gomero

Who invented the silbo homero?


Even before Silbo Homero became the language of the shepherds – this happened already under Spanish rule, when the language of the local population was lost and Spanish came into use – the whistling language was used to communicate between four different tribes living on the island. Their leaders gathered together to discuss pressing matters – everyone was notified about this on silbo: such a piercing whistle was heard far away: it is believed that three kilometers for these sounds is not the limit.

Such a landscape required a special way to quickly transmit information

Yes, and other news instantly became the property of all the inhabitants of the island, who, like the natives of other Canary Islands, completely different from each other, are usually called “”.

In the usual way in such a rugged area – with deep chasms, steep slopes and sheer walls of the remnants of extinct volcanoes – these messages would be transmitted too slowly.

A restaurant in Agulo where we enjoyed the whistling language

Guanches from La Gomera, who did not know writing, which did not allow their culture to be fully preserved, were not stupid at all. In addition to the Silbo Homero language, they own three more unique inventions that are common in the Canaries:

1. the ability to speak silently (at close range) and understand each other only by moving their lips;
2. the use of pole vaulting to move around the mountainous island and the creation of combat techniques using poles, which had a very complex technique;
3. embalming of the dead in ways similar to those used in ancient Egypt, but significantly different from them.

The language of the ancient inhabitants of La Gomera has not been preserved: now local craftsmen whistle using Spanish, but in the restaurant they also demonstrate the interpretation of Russian words. Unfortunately, I did not have time to record this part of the performance, but you can listen to how, using only six sounds, they not only “speak” with a whistle, but also understand each other. Even foreigners guess individual expressions transmitted to silbo gomero.

What is required to master the whistling language?


As the guides say, this requires an excellent ear for music and serious training. Therefore, in order not to lose the unique language, Silbo Homero, along with other subjects, is taught in primary schools – these are eight-year educational institutions that remain the only accessible educational institutions for many Homers, since further education is paid everywhere and is beyond the power of the families where he works in agriculture, one father receives about 800 euros for the expenses of all households (for comparison: secondary education requires a fee of about 900 euros).

Professor Andre Klass turns on the tape recorder. A strong, ear-piercing modulated whistle is heard in the phonetics laboratory of the Department of Modern Languages ​​at Glasgow University. One might think that this is the conversation of angry thrushes, but the whistle is too strong for this, and besides, it is known that people whistle. Professor Klass translates:

“What time does the bus leave for Saint Sebastian?” Or:

“Have you seen my goat?”

These are samples of the whistling language, common on one of the islands of the Canary archipelago – on the island of Gomera. Mountains of volcanic origin, with an endless number of peaks, no plains, no roads. Here, on the island of La Gomera, the shortest journey on foot becomes a job suitable only for mules. Therefore, the indigenous people communicate with each other with the help of a whistle, known among linguists as “silbo gomero”. This whistle can be compared in strength to locomotive whistles. The average “silbador” (the so-called people “speaking” silbo) can be heard for 8 kilometers, and the record hearing was 14 kilometers. This method of communication replaces the telephone on the island.

Understanding the silbo gomero principle was not so easy. Some travelers tried to view it from a musical point of view. One of them believed, for example, that high-pitched whistles correspond to certain vowel sounds and provide a phonetic skeleton of a phrase, according to which the silbadores understand each other more or less well. Another wrote down with the help of musical signs the melody of several phrases in silbo, but when he let the silbadors listen to this melody, they did not understand anything. This traveler even suggested that thought transmission at a distance plays a certain role here.

Nothing happened: silbo homero is a real language that can be understood without resorting to the services of either musicians or telepaths. It is nothing but whistled Spanish.

How can you whistle in Spanish or any other language, you ask. And, really, try to whistle some phrase – you will not succeed.

In ordinary language, speech sounds are formed with the participation of the entire speech apparatus: larynx, pharynx, nasal cavity, oral cavity (lips, tongue, teeth, palate). But a whistle is a simple sound. It can only differ in pitch, volume, and duration. How, then, can the whistle be modified so that it becomes possible to explain with its help?

It turns out that for this it is enough to change only the pitch. The strength of the sound in the silbo does not matter, since the silbador always whistles to the maximum of his abilities: otherwise he risks not being heard.

In order to vary the pitch, the silbadors use their natural resonator – the oral cavity. The silbadores whistle the way boys usually whistle; with fingers.

The whistle technique is very different. There are at least six different whistling techniques:

1) part of the hole formed by the lips is closed with the index finger;

2) a bent index finger is inserted between the lips and serves as a support for the tongue;

3) the little finger inserted into the corner of the mouth serves the same purpose;

4) two fingers are inserted deep enough into the corners of the mouth and connected to the tip of the tongue;

5) the index finger or bent little finger is inserted very deeply into the mouth.

And you can whistle without the help of your fingers, resting your tongue against the sky, but this requires some practice.

Can we talk about pronunciation in Silbo in the usual sense of the word? No, because when “talking” in Silbo, the tongue and lips remain almost motionless. So, for example, to pronounce the word “pa”, we close our lips, the glottis closes in the silbador, interrupting the sound, and a similar effect occurs. If you need to whistle the word “ata”, the tongue rests against the palate, the volume of the oral cavity changes, and a sound is born, which, after rising to pronounce the vowel “a”, quickly falls. In the word “ara” the vibration is different, since the tongue does not touch the palate and does not interfere with the flow of a long, slightly modulated whistle.

Of course, a literary language with a rich silbo vocabulary is unlikely. This is not without distortion, the combination of the same sounds can correspond to a variety of words. And you need a lot of intuition to correctly interpret the sounds. However, Professor Klass claims that he has never met a silbador who did not understand his brother.

The silbo technique and the nature of the sounds are different in different areas of the island.

Since when did the natives of the island of Gomera begin to explain themselves with such a sawn-off shotgun? Obviously a very long time ago. It is known that the first inhabitants of the island, the Guanches, used silbo, but its basis was the local, now extinct language. In the 14th century, when the Spaniards conquered the Canary Islands, the whistling language adapted to Spanish.

Differences in the Silbo language are not only local but also individual. Each silbador has his own style and register, which, however, are easily perceived by the interlocutor.

This exotic language is quite natural for the inhabitants of the island. The class tells an interesting story. In 1882, the alcalde Saint Sebastian was forced to deprive the flock of the nightly Christmas service for a very unexpected reason: the parishioners stubbornly resisted his ban on whistling the words of psalms during mass.

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Landmarks and surroundings of the island of Tenerife

Table of contents

Tenerife is an island in the archipelago of the Canary Islands. It is located in the Atlantic Ocean and covers an area of ​​more than 2,000 square kilometers. The population of the island is about 900 thousand people. It is part of the state of Spain.

Tenerife

Tenerife is the largest island in the archipelago. He occupies a central place in it. About a thousand kilometers separate it from the Iberian Peninsula, about three hundred kilometers to the coast of Africa. The island is shaped like a ham. It reaches a length of 85 kilometers, a width of up to 50 kilometers. The length of the coastline is approximately 342 kilometers.

The island is volcanic, with Mount Teide rising in its center. Its height is 3718 meters above sea level. The last eruption was in 1909. A volcanic mountain range divides the island into southern and northern parts. On the north side the climate is cooler and damp, on the south side it is drier and sunny.

Tenerife is called the “Island of Eternal Spring”, and all thanks to its climate. It is warm here all year round, as it is located at the latitude of the Sahara Desert. The temperature in winter (20-26 degrees) and summer (23-29degrees) time differs slightly. The Atlantic Ocean has a special influence on air temperature. Unlike continental Spain, the island is not cold in winter, but warm in autumn.

The tourism industry in Tenerife began to develop in the nineteenth century. This was due to the manifestation of interest in the local agricultural lands of the British. Today, the island’s economy is based on tourism. About three million people a year come here for recreation and entertainment. Modern tourist infrastructure began to take shape in the 50s of the twentieth century. Since that time, many private and public hotels have been built. The most popular resorts are Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Costa Adeje. The largest tourist flow is from England, Germany is somewhat behind it.

The Teide volcano is located in the municipality of La Orotava. It is the highest peak in Spain and the central site of the Teide National Park. The height of the volcano is 3718 meters. Teide is very popular with tourists. On its slopes there is a national park. The crater can be reached by cable car from the highway. It starts at an altitude of 2356 meters, the trailers rise to the top (up to a height of 3555 meters) in just eight minutes. They can accommodate up to 45 people.

All the islands of the archipelago are perfectly visible from the top, except for Lanzarote, Graciosa, Fuerteventura. Above the cable car entrance mark, entrance is limited, but you can pre-order a pass and climb to the very top (163 meters on foot). The beliefs of the Guanches say that the evil demon Guayota lived inside the volcano.

Teide National Park covers an area of ​​just under nineteen thousand square kilometers. It is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The building of the Opera Auditorio de Tenerife, the symbol of the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, is one of the most interesting sights. This is a significant work of modern architecture built in 2003. Project by Santiago Calatrava. The image of the building can be seen on local stamps and postcards.

Notable are the six stepped pyramids, which are collectively called the Guimar Pyramids. They are located on the southeast coast of the island. Despite the mystery of their origin, scientists consider them not ancient monuments, but heaps of local farmers. Their customs include stacking stones at the border of fields. The practice spread over time, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Locals, however, say that such pyramids were built from ancient times. According to local ancient images, their erection was a common practice. They were demolished due to their uselessness and used as cheap building material. There were nine pyramids in Guimar, of which only six survived, which are called the Pyramids of Guimar.

Inferno Gorges is a nature reserve. It is located in the southwestern part of Tenerife in the municipality of Adeje. Hell Gorge is one of the main attractions of the island.

The Royal Basilica of Candelaria Catholic Church is located in the city of Candelaria. This is a small basilica, which was created in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She is Our Lady of Candelaria and patroness of the Canary Islands. It is the largest sanctuary in the Canary Islands. The basilica and sanctuary of the Virgin Mary are a single religious complex, a center of pilgrimage for Catholics. Nearby is the Dominican Monastery of the Presentation of the Lord and the Museum of Ecclesiastical Art.

Siam Park is located in the southern part of the island. It is close to the TF-1 highway in Costa Adeje. The park covers an area of ​​18.5 hectares. They built attractions and buildings, restaurants. The territory and buildings are decorated in the Siamese theme. The opening of the park was entrusted to the Princess of Thailand. The water park is owned by the owner of Loro Park. Here you can buy double tickets to both parks at a good discount. The attraction of Siam Park is the tower of power slide, which has a height of 28 meters.

The village of Masca is located in the municipality of Buenavista del Norte. It is located in the west of Tenerife in the mountains at the top of the Masca Gorge. From the municipality to the village about eleven kilometers. It is located at an altitude of six hundred meters above sea level. The number of inhabitants is insignificant, only about a hundred. However, this place is one of the most visited by tourists. The village has preserved the authentic atmosphere of the Canarian province. Picturesque natural landscapes also attract vacationers here.

In the 1960s, it became possible to reach Masca by road, and it became accessible to a wide tourist flow. Until that time, people got here by mountain paths, there was no electricity and modern amenities in the village. Local residents are engaged in agriculture and entertainment for tourists. Musca has several restaurants and tourist shops. On weekends, you can visit the museum, which contains exhibits of household items of local residents of past generations. It also showcases the history of hiking trails in the gorge.

Not far from Puerto de la Cruz is Loro Park. Its territory includes 123 thousand square kilometers. The park is notable for the orchid house and the penguinarium, the bat cave. It also houses the largest dolphinarium in Europe. The paths of the park are surrounded by lush vegetation of green gardens.

Loro Parque has the largest collection of parrots. There are about three hundred species in total. They hold special shows for tourists. Children can also be taken to see killer whales and sea lions. In a small zoo live animals of different species. There is a cactus park.

The Tenerife Botanical Garden is of interest to many tourists. It is visited to see an impressive collection of tropical and subtropical plants. The atmosphere of the garden is created by magnificent palm trees of different types. They are available in various sizes and colors.

The giant dragon tree is visited by almost all tourists arriving in Tenerife. Its age is over a thousand years. There is an amazing plant in the city of Icod de los Vinos. The ancient city of Garachico appears in its architectural and historical splendor. It is also worth visiting.

Tenerife Holidays

The music festival “De Musica de Canarias” takes place in Tenerife at the end of January every year. The “Holy Week” event precedes Easter and is celebrated on the island in a colorful way. It includes many religious processions that take place in different cities and towns. In May, the “Feast of the Cross” is held. In mid-June, the Corpus Christi festival. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that local residents lay out original carpets on the streets with flowers. The island has a Summer Solstice. It is associated with the feast of Saint Juan. And similar to the Slavic celebration of Ivan Kupala, symbolic jumps over fires are held.

The Feast of Our Lady of Candelar is held on 14 and 15 August. This is the most significant event for the people of Tenerife and the Canary Islands. Home holidays are Christmas and New Year. Only a few islanders go out to the squares for fun and dancing, lighting fireworks.

The February carnival “Mardi Gras” impresses with its pomp and scale. According to these indicators, it is perhaps second only to the Brazilian Carnival. Carnival fever infects the inhabitants of all cities and towns of the island. Carnival is especially important in the capital Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The selection of the Queen of February is accompanied by unbridled fun and street entertainment. At the carnival, traditional Canarian food and drinks are served in huge quantities. It ends with the beginning of Lent.

Tenerife beaches

Tenerife’s coastline is rocky and steep. This is especially true for the northern part of the island. However, the total length of the island beaches is more than 67 kilometers. They are sandy with a clean surface and warm sea.

The most prominent representative of the beaches is El Medano. In terms of its attractiveness for a beach holiday, it is second only to the beaches of the neighboring island of Fuerteventura. The northern part of the coast includes pebbly beaches and black sand beaches. On the south and southwest sides, the beaches are covered with light sand. In the resort areas, the coast is landscaped and equipped with excellent infrastructure. Many beaches have white sand.

Lava tubes are a feature of the island. These are volcanic tunnels in the ground. Lava flowed over them during a volcanic eruption. They were formed due to uneven cooling of the upper and lower layers of the lava flow. Long voids formed underground tunnels. The most attractive of them for tourists is the Wind Cave. It is located near the city of Icod de los Vinos. It is the largest lava tube in Europe and one of the largest in the world.

Best time to visit Tenerife

Tenerife is warm all year round, sea water is also suitable for swimming at any time. But still there is a low and high season.

The high season is in September and October. During these months, there is the warmest sea water on the coast. Prices in hotels are high, at this time the largest number of tourists arrive. The weather, like all year round, is not hot.

The low season on the island is rather arbitrary. A smaller number of tourists come from December to January and from March to April.

The beach season in Tenerife lasts all year round. You can swim in the sea both in summer and winter. In January, the water temperature is +19 degrees, which is quite acceptable for swimming.

Or maybe we’ll go to the island of Mallorca for a vacation? This is an unusual place in Spain, which has gathered wonderful sights. More information about the island can be found here https://kyrortik.ru/slavnaya-ispaniya-ostrov-mayorka/.

Tenerife 2019

Tenerife Island is an excellent resort place for a comfortable seaside holiday. Local beaches are diverse and surprisingly beautiful. Sea water is clean and warm. All year round there is no cold and real heat. Always warm in spring.

The nature of the island is picturesque views of mountains and landscapes overgrown with subtropical greenery. The urban architecture is authentic and attractive for sightseeing. Villages and small settlements are unique in their color and features.

Tourism infrastructure has been developed and improved over the past few decades. It includes hotels and hotels of different levels and classes. Prices for rooms are different, you can find quite economical and elite offers. Local restaurants and cafes, bars and eateries offer specific Canarian cuisine. But there are also many establishments that serve dishes from the menu of European cuisine.

The main part of the island’s income comes from the tourism industry. Therefore, everything here is geared towards the tourist flow, which amounts to several million a year and does not stop all year round.

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Spain Valencia resort town: port city on Spain’s southeast coast » Tyler Herro commented on the poor performance in the last playoffs.

In the regular season, Herro averaged 20.7 points, 5 rebounds and 4 assists. He was recognized as the NBA’s best reserve player. In knockout matches, his performance was 12.6 points, 3.9rebounds and 2.8 assists.

“First, I had a groin injury, but it didn’t happen right away. I still played poorly early in the playoffs. This was partly due to the news that I would have another child.

I have thought about this a lot. It was just such a time. It is what it is. Now I’m ready to play again. Obviously the playoffs didn’t go the way I wanted, but it’s another year and another try,” Herro said.

Boston is rocking, the Nets are a reality show, Harden is refreshed. BasketTalk with Roman Sprikut rate the Atlantic Division

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bring Plajové to Tenerife

Tenerife is the most famous and visited island from the archipelago of the Canary Islands. You’ll swim in Tenerife for a while, somehow you’ll miss it somehow, everything in Canarit is warmer than the last year. It’s worth the location near the golemite tourist complex and has forest access, showers, chadors and sun loungers. It is common to swim in the northern half of Tenerife with a black volcanic pyask, dokato in the south – with a golden one. Ostrov sche vy suggest over 67 km. Plazhov, and cleanliness on Plazhna Ivitsa and ocean water are not subject to removal.

Ako veche stewed to rest in Tenerife, you can tell me that the islands are located with excellent and most diverse beaches. And, if everyone still didn’t go, the tazi article is definitely for you! Recognize it with find a beach on the island of Tenerife and write it down for our flight from Varna!

1* Playa Jardín is a urban beach offering all the amenities you need for your dream vacation in Tenerife. Pyask’te is volcanic, with exotic black flowers. Located in the northern part of the islands in Puerto de la Cruz. “Jardín” in Spanish means “hailstone”, so many and many from the immense vegetation and beautifully blooming, enclosing the beach.

2* Playa Martiánez Another “bijou” in Puerto de la Cruz is the second most popular beach in the resort next to Playa Jardín. The pyaschnata ivytsya is black, covered with a mek, a volcanic pyask, fenced off from the beach by an alley with palm trees. Kogato bring in sa golem, the locality is suitable for the surfiran. With everything close to the world one of the most famous attractions in Tenerife – Lago Martianez. There are water pools, some salt water from the ocean, filtrira in the water park from the lake, cascading waterfalls, beautiful green gardens, sunbathing areas, restaurants, bars and cafenets. The complex was designed from birth in Lanzarote by the artist César Manrique and is wonderfully suited for families since childhood, offering fun for all ages.

3* El Bullullo A picturesque black beach in the northern part of Tenerife. For yes, you will reach him, trembling, yes, you will pass over the edge of bananas and plantations, and yes, you will climb down the stilbi. But you deserve it, so stay calm and secluded in the place. Plazhyt ima format for a crescent. It is not protected from the natural reef, so you can see the currents of the sag golem.


4* Playa de las Teresitas – Playa de las Teresitas Visit card for the island of Tenerife. Aco ste looked at the pictures from there, nyama began and did not hesitate to dream and vie and rest under the palm trees … The beach was artificially created from the golden sands of the desert Sahara and spread over 1.5 kilometers. Protected from golemite by ocean waves through the incrustation from volcanic stones. You will open to the north from the capital Santa Cruz, just 15 minutes from the stake. In the immediate vicinity of restaurants and bars.

5* Los Cristianos – Los Cristianos se namira in the southwestern part of Tenerife and close to Playa de las Americas sa famous kato “Canarscata riviera” is a favorite destination for all tourists. The sand on the beach in the resort of Los Cristianos is excellent, and in the vicinity you will also get on the natural black. Vodata is a lot calmer, as on the edge of the city there is a tile area, which is especially attractive for families from a child. Long beach alley is filled with shops, restaurants, cafes and bars, you can go and enjoy the beauty of Tenerife. In Los Cristianos, it is a marina and yacht haven, from here you can go on a boat trip, watch delphins and whales, or visit the islands of La Gomera, La Palma and El Hierro with a feriboat.

6* Playa de las Americas – Playa de las Americas is a popular party – destination on the island of Tenerife. Osven offers many bars and establishments, resorts offer excellent conditions for staying on the beach, water and sports beaches, underwater skiing, surfiran, excursions from catamarans, etc. For a long time, the beaches of Ivici will be visited by tourists all over the place.

7* Playa San Marcos – In other words, mark the back of the spiral of the eye of the eye on the overhanging rocks above Icod de los Vinos, in the northwestern part of the islands. The beach is black and offers a calm atmosphere and the comfort of a restaurant, where you can enjoy Canarian cuisine. Look at it so beautifully, especially in the evening, at some point the sun is slyly…

8* Playa del Duque – imagine the sea of ​​golden sand, crystal clear Turkic-Azerbaijan water, ocean floor and noise on the air… Yes, we are talking about Costa Adeje and the beach of Playa del Duque. Don’t worry if you see the blue flag – the beach is distinguished with a “Blue Flag” certificate, guaranteeing the cleanliness of the beach, sea water and nearby areas. Along the beach alley you will find many different bars, restaurants and boutiques.

9* Playa Fañabé – Playa Fanabe This is one of the best beaches in Tenerife. Namira is located south of the Costa Adeje and is distinguished by the Blue Flag for its cleanliness and temple standard. Here you can enjoy a quiet rest and avoid the noisy golems of the resort.

10* El Médano (El Médano) – how do you love sports days – this is the place for you! Plažnata Ivica has reached 2 km and is the most famous beach in Tenerife. On El Medano, vinagi ima surfisti and every day of the year will see the lighthouses of the kite surf race. There you will also experience the true Bohemian atmosphere of the Canary Islands. Namira is in the southeast part of Tenerife, El Medano resort.

Every beach on the island of Tenerife is charming and there are many places to visit. Don’t miss our offer for a six-day vacation to the island of Tenerife with a flight from Varna, or leave the office for DES Tours, we will gladly organize your vacation with the desire to give you a vacation!

P.