Discover whistled speech in La Gomera’s Silbo Gomero, Turkey’s Kuskoy, Greece’s Antia and France’s Aas—how it works, why it endured, and what’s being saved.
Imagine a whistle drifting from afar—clear, sustained, shifting in tone. It isn’t just a sound to call someone over. It’s speech. In a few corners of the world, people still hold conversations by whistling—full sentences that keep their meaning.
This way of communicating emerged long ago in places where shouting was pointless and phones didn’t exist: in mountains, forests, and scattered villages. A whistle carries for kilometers and cuts cleanly across ravines or through dense trees.
Whistled languages aren’t separate tongues like Spanish or Turkish; they’re a special mode of rendering ordinary speech. People don’t just swap signals—they whistle entire sentences. The whistle mirrors a language’s intonation and rhythm, letting a listener grasp what’s being said.
It can seem implausible, yet it works. Words turn into melody—timbre and pitch stand in for consonants and vowels—and those who grow up with the system understand one another with ease. The effect feels surprisingly natural once you hear it in context.
The best-known case is La Gomera, one of Spain’s Canary Islands. There, a whistled form of Spanish called Silbo Gomero took shape among shepherds who needed to talk across long distances—over gullies and hillsides.
Today it hasn’t just survived; it’s taught in schools and woven into local identity. On the island, roughly 22,000 people can at least understand Silbo Gomero, and some can “speak” it too. That choice has helped keep the tradition in everyday life rather than on museum shelves.
In Turkey, the village of Kuskoy—literally “Bird Village”—has a similar practice. Locals have long relied on whistling to communicate, calling it the “bird language.” While younger residents use it less, older generations still remember how to “talk” in whistles.
On the Greek island of Euboea, in the village of Antia, a group of speakers remains as well. Researchers from UCL have begun studying how the system works, recording and analyzing the sounds to help preserve this rare form of communication.
Sometimes such traditions slip away. In Aas, a village in France’s Pyrenees, locals once had their own whistled speech used by shepherds. After the death of the last woman who spoke it fluently—she was known as Anna Paiyas—the practice nearly disappeared.
There is still a glimmer of hope. In 2024, enthusiasts posted the first audio recording of the language in many years. That archive helps keep its memory alive—and, with luck, could one day support a revival.
Whistling might look like a charming curiosity, but it also says a lot about how humans communicate. Whistled speech shows that meaning can be carried not only by words, but by sound itself—a reminder that language stretches far beyond the written page.