Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

In some areas of the world, especially areas with low populations and difficult terrain, a whistled form of language has been developed to allow communication when using ordinary language would be difficult. The whistled speech is not a new language, but is instead a literal translation to the new form. In a typical translation:

• Each phoneme has a whistled equivalent.
• Vowel aperture is replaced by a set of more or less stable pitch ranges.
• Consonants are produced by pitch transitions between vowels.
• Stress is expressed by higher pitch or increased length
• Intonation exists, but conflicts with segmental pitch changes.

"My brother was once hiking around Gomera with a friend. They ran out of drinking water and asked a local person for some. This person said she didn't have any (it was a very dry area!) but her neighbor up the mountain could help. "I'll let her know you're coming" she said, and whistled up the mountain. They walked up the mountain. My brother walked ahead and arrived first. When he got to the house, a stranger sitting there said: "Ah, there you are. The water's right around the corner there; but where is your friend?"

Read more in this posting on the Linguist List and in these set of papers.