Silbo Gomero ( , "Gomeran whistle"), also known as el silbo ("the whistle"), is a whistled register of Spanish that is used by inhabitants of La Gomera, in the Canary Islands. It was historically used to communicate across the deep ravines and narrow valleys that radiate through the island and enabled messages to be exchanged over a distance of up to five kilometres. Its loudness causes Silbo Gomero to be generally used for public communication. Messages that are conveyed range from event invitations to public information advisories. A speaker of Silbo Gomero is sometimes called a silbador ("whistler").
Silbo Gomero is a transposition of Spanish from speech to whistling. The spoken–whistled phoneme substitution emulates Spanish phonology through a reduced set of whistled phonemes. In 2009, UNESCO declared it a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
History
thumb|left|The narrow valleys of [[La Gomera.]]
Little is known of the original Guanche language or the languages of the Canary Islands, but it is assumed that their phonological system must have been simple enough to allow an efficient whistled language. It was used by the island's original inhabitants, the Guanches. The whistled language existed before the arrival of Spanish settlers and was also spoken on El Hierro, Tenerife and Gran Canaria. Silbo was adapted to Spanish during the Spanish settlement in the 16th century and was widely spoken throughout into the 17th century. In 1976, Silbo barely remained on El Hierro, where it had flourished at the end of the 19th century. Use of the language declined in the 1950s, one factor being the economic decline, which led many speakers to move away to seek better jobs. Technological developments such as the telephone played a part in reducing the practicality and utility of the language. The language's earlier survival had been caused by its role in overcoming distance and terrain, in addition to the ease with which it is learned by native speakers. Most significantly, from the 1960s to 1980s, many people turned away from agriculture and so many middle-class families did not want their children to speak the language, as it was negatively associated with the rural peasants.
In the late 1990s, language revitalization efforts began, and initiatives from within the community started. By 1999, the revitalization of Silbo Gomero was furthered by education policies and other legislative measures. It now has official protection as an example of intangible cultural heritage.
Speakers
Many people in La Gomera speak Silbo Gomero, but their expression of the language deviates in minor ways that show the speaker's origins. According to a 2009 UNESCO report, all of La Gomera's inhabitants understand the language, but only those born before 1950 and the younger generations who attended school since 1999 can speak it.
Vowels
Silbo Gomero's vowels are described roughly as sustained lines of different frequencies, falling into four frequency bands, which are statistically distinct from each other In 2005, Annie Rialland of the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle published an acoustic and phonological analysis of Silbo based on new materials that showed that not only gliding tones but also intensity modulation plays a role in distinguishing Silbo's sounds.
Trujillo's 2005 collaboration with the Gomeran whistler Isidro Ortiz and others revised his earlier work, found that four vowels are indeed perceived and described in detail the areas of divergence between his empirical data and Classe's phonetic hypotheses. Despite Trujillo's 2005 work acknowledging the existence of four vowels, his 2006 bilingual work El Silbo Gomero. Nuevo estudio fonológico inexplicably reiterated his two-vowel theory. Trujillo's 2006 work directly addressed many of Rialland's conclusions, but it seems that at the time of that writing, he was unaware of Meyer's work.
Meyer suggests that there are four vowel classes: , , , . However, Meyer also states there are five perceived vowels with significant overlap. Rialland and Trujillo agree that the harmonic of the whistle matches the second formant of the spoken vowels. Spoken 's F2 and whistled 's H1 match in their frequency (1480 Hz). However, there is a disconnect in harmonics and formants near the frequency basement. Spoken speech has a wide range of F2 frequencies (790 Hz to 2300 Hz), but whistles are limited to between . That causes vowels to be shifted upward at the lower end (maintaining 1480 Hz as ), increasing confusion between (spoken F2 frequency 890 Hz, whistled <1300 Hz) and (spoken frequency 790 Hz, whistled <<1300 Hz). In whistling, the frequency basement must be raised to the minimum whistle harmonic of 1000 Hz, frequency spacing in the vowels, which increases misidentification of the lower vowels.
Consonants
Silbo Gomero's consonants are modifications of the vowel-based "melody line" or "vocal line". They can rise or fall and be modified by being broken, continuous or occlusive. The four main consonants in a 1978 analysis are listed as follows:
In popular culture
The filmmaker and photographer Francesca Phillips wrote and directed a 26-minute documentary on the usage of Silbo Gomero in La Gomera, Written in the Wind (2009). The movie won Best Short Documentary in Anthropology at the World Mountain Documentary Festival held in Qinghai, China, in 2010.
The Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu directed the 2019 film The Whistlers, in which Silbo features prominently.
The French singer Féloche dedicated a song to Silbo, released in an album of the same name.
There are other examples of transposition of an oral natural language into a pitch string. When quickly spoken, Yoruba vowels are assimilated and consonants elided and so linguistic information is carried by the tone system, which can therefore be transposed into talking drums.
References
External links
- silbo-gomero.com – Jeff Brent's homepage
- Silbo Gomero – The Whistling Language. .
- BBC4 interviews Isidro Ortiz & J.Brent – 26 August 2008