Silbo Gomero
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Located on the island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands is one of the most unusual languages on Earth. For centuries, people on this island have been able to communicate over vast distances not by shouting, using smoke signals or drums, but rather by whistling. This system allowed them to communicate just as easily as if they were talking, and it's still being used today. Learn more about Silbo Gomero, the whistling language of the Canary Islands, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

This episode is sponsored by the Spanish Office of Tourism. In past episodes, I've told you all about the great things to see and do in Spain. From tasting some of the best food in the world to experiencing the unique whistling language on the island of Gomera, there's tons to see and do in Spain.

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Once again, that's spain.info. Before I get into the specifics of Silbo Gomero, which is usually just referred to as Silbo, which is the Spanish word for whistle, I should explain the geography of the island of La Gomera because the island's geography is responsible for the creation of Silbo.

If you remember back to my episode on the Canary Islands, despite being part of the same archipelago, each island has a very different geography. For example, Lanzarote is almost all volcanic rock with very little vegetation. La Palma is a lush green island. Tenerife is green on the windward side and dry on the leeward side, and it also has the highest peak in all of Spain. La Gobera is a circular mountainous island with very deep valleys known as barrancos.

The center of the island captures moisture and is very lush. It's often in fog, which is where much of the water on the island is captured. Over the years, water erosion has created these very deep barrancos between the mountains. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish in the late 15th century, La Gomera was home to the Guanche people, who were the native inhabitants of the Canary Islands. We don't know much about the original Guanche language. However, based on the accounts of the first Spaniards who arrived, we know that they also communicated by whistling.

The Guanche didn't just use whistling on La Gomera. There were reports of it being used on other islands as well, including El Iro, Tenerife, and Gran Canaria. As Spanish settlers began to arrive on the island, they adopted the whistling that the Guanche people used for their own communications. The language became known as Silbo Gomera, which means the Gomera whistle in Spanish, and the speakers became known as Silbadores.

And I should note that whistling was not the language of the Gwanché people. Whistling was a separate way of communicating from their spoken language. So, what was the point of whistling as opposed to just talking? It has to do with distance and sound. Words become difficult to decipher over long distances, even if you're shouting. And there's a limit to how loud the average person can shout.

Whistling can allow sounds to travel longer distances, which is very valuable if you're in the mountains or a dense forest. The main reason is because whistling doesn't involve the use of your vocal cords. If you've ever been to a concert or a loud restaurant where you had to shout to speak, you've probably seen firsthand the stress on your vocal cords that can occur from shouting too much.

A skilled whistler can achieve 120 decibels of sound, whereas screaming can usually only hit 80 to 100 decibels. Moreover, a whistle is usually in the range of 1 to 4 kilohertz, which is above that of ambient noise. The end result is that you can usually hear a whistle about 10 times further than you can hear a shout. Here I'm going to take a brief detour from the island of La Gomera to talk about whistling languages around the world.

While the Canary Islands is the best known location today for whistling languages, it's far from the only place where whistling developed as a form of communication. At least 80 whistling languages have been identified around the world, and depending on how you define it, there may have actually been hundreds. They have been found on every continent inhabited by humans, if you include Papua New Guinea as part of Greater Geographic Australia.

In their 1976 book Whistled Languages, communication researchers René Guy-Bousnel and André Klaas noted what all whistling languages have in common. They said, "...all whistled languages share one basic characteristic. They function by varying the frequency of a simple waveform as a function of time, generally with minimal dynamic variations, which is readily understandable, since in most cases their only purpose is long-distance communication."

It should come as no surprise that tonal languages are more likely to have a whistle variant than non-tonal languages. As the language already uses pitch as a component of the language, it isn't as big of a leap to adapt that to whistling. That being said, non-tonal languages, like Spanish, have been adapted to whistling as well. Despite the common use of calling whistling languages a language, which I've been doing this entire episode,

Technically, linguists would not classify them as a language because they have no unique vocabulary or grammar. What they're doing is transposing the sounds in one language onto whistles. So a whistling language doesn't have different words per se. It's just that the sounds that make up the words are instead made via whistles. So you don't have to learn new vocabulary or grammar. You use the words and grammar of the language you're converting to whistling. You just need to know the conversion.

In the particular case of Silbo Gomero, each vowel and consonant is replaced with a whistle. Because there aren't any sounds like there are in speech, the sounds in Silbo are made with the tone of the whistle and if it is continuous or broken. There have been many language scholars who have studied Silbo and they have debated as to whether there are two or four vowels with some claiming that there's a fifth vowel that actually overlaps with some other ones.

Likewise, consonants can be grouped as continuous high pitch, broken high pitch, continuous low pitch, or broken low pitch. Needless to say, Silbo can be a very difficult language to learn. One problem that can arise is that some people simply can't whistle. One native of Lagomera claimed to be able to understand Silbo, but he was never himself able to whistle.

Even between speakers of Silbo, if they aren't used to talking to each other, it might take a bit to clarify what is being said, as if they were two speakers of the same language, but both had really strong regional accents. An interesting study was conducted on speakers of Silbo. Teams from the Universities of Washington and La Laguna in the Canary Islands looked at MRI scans of speakers and non-speakers of Silbo.

Each of them whistled while in an MRI machine. The speakers of Silbo showed that the language centers of their brains were active when whistling, whereas the non-speakers didn't use that part of their brain. With that explanation of what Silbo and whistling languages are, I want to go back to how this language developed and evolved. As I mentioned, we know that the native Gwanché people communicated by whistling. We don't know if it was the same whistling system used today, but the odds are that it was probably very similar.

The Spanish who began to settle on the island found the whistling system used by the guanche and began to adapt it to Spanish. It was extremely useful when farmers were working on the terrace sides of the mountains, which can be seen all over La Gomera. Whistling allowed for communication across vast valleys. The language was taught in a master-student fashion, usually within individual families. After the Spanish Civil War, the Guardia Civil, the national police force in Spain, would often round up locals to help them put out fires on the island.

The farmers would be taken from whatever they happened to be doing at the time and put to work without pay, as the money that was supposed to go to them was kept by local officials. The locals would use the whistling language, which the Guardia Civil officials didn't understand, to give advance warning around the island. Eventually, the Guardia Civil couldn't find anybody because everybody would leave before they arrived.

By the 1950s, the use of Silbo Gomero started to decline. It simply couldn't compete with telephones and later mobile phones for long-distance communication, and many of the speakers of Silbo immigrated to other islands, Venezuela or to the Spanish mainland. By the early 1980s, Silbo Gomero had become almost an extinct language. There were only a handful of Silbadors left. The locals of La Gomera eventually made efforts to preserve their unique cultural traditions in the late 1990s.

The few remaining silbadores began teaching silbo gomera in schools where it became a mandatory subject for all of the students on the island. The reintroduction of silbo on the island has been a great success. However, it led to a very odd situation. On the island today, people born before 1950 tend to be quite fluent, as are younger people who've been in school since the reintroduction in the late 90s. The generation of people in between don't actually know it quite as well.

Most of them have a basic understanding, but can't necessarily carry a complex conversation. It's estimated that the entire population of the island above school age has at least a basic understanding of Silbo Gomero, which would put the number of speakers at around 20,000. In recognition of the uniqueness of the language, in 2009, UNESCO placed Silbo Gomero on the representative list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

If you visit La Gomera when you're in the Canary Islands, which is something I highly recommend, there are demonstrations of Silbo Gomero which are performed at local hotels and other establishments. So far during this episode, I've been talking about a whistling language, which I must admit is rather dry. So before I end, I'd like to actually give you some examples of Silbo Gomero in action.

These are a collection of clips that I found from various videos around the internet where silbadores are speaking identifiable phrases. This first clip simply shows the difference between the vowel sound for A and E. Here is a class of school children in Lagomero all saying buenos dias and pay close attention to how similar the cadence of the whistled version is to the spoken version.

Here now is a complete sentence. The silbador in this case is saying, una botella de vino tinto, which simply means a bottle of red wine. To demonstrate that the whistling can be used to express sounds in any language, here is someone saying, bonjour, como se va, which is a mix of French and Spanish. Whistling

And finally, just to put everything together, here is what part of a full conversation would sound like between two silbadores. As you can see, there's really nothing in the world quite like Silbo Gomero. While there are other whistling languages, none of them have survived into the 21st century with as many speakers and with as large of a thriving community as the whistlers on the island of La Gomera.

The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiefer. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters.

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