Silbo Gomero: What Can You Say in a Whistle?

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On La Gomera, in Spain’s Canary Islands, Spanish can be carried in whistles. Silbo Gomero gives people a way to communicate across the island’s difficult terrain, beyond the reach of ordinary conversation. [1][2]

I can see the appeal of introducing it as a marvellous trick for crossing a ravine. But that leaves the interesting question waiting on the other side: what does the person who hears it actually understand?

Words, rather than a list of signals

A whistle used to attract somebody’s attention can do its job without representing a sentence. Silbo goes further: it reproduces selected features of spoken language, allowing words to be combined into messages. Its present-day source language is Spanish. [1][2]

That makes the learning task quite different from memorising, say, three agreed signals for stop, come here and danger. You need to relate the changing sound to speech.

Linguists Julien Meyer and Juan N. Casimiro describe the transformation as a complex voice signal reduced to a changing line of pitch. In Gomero Spanish, vowel qualities are reflected in whistle height: their analysis places /i/ high, /o/ and /u/ low, with /e/ and /a/ between. Consonants modify that line through changes in frequency and strength. [2]

So the tune isn’t simply the rise and fall of somebody’s speaking voice. The pitch is also doing work that spoken vowels and consonants normally do.

You’ll often encounter a description of two vowels and four consonants, including in UNESCO’s account. There is a complication worth keeping. Meyer and Casimiro report finer vowel distinctions in their acoustic data; their illustrated distribution contains 103 vowels from one master whistler. Even the 2005 teaching collection includes Isidro Ortiz Mendoza’s method using four vowels. [1][2][3] I wouldn’t turn the neat six-sound description into a claim that every whistle produced fits six perfectly separate boxes.

Learning to send a message—and repair one

The Canary Islands government’s 2005 teaching materials offer a more useful starting point than an exotic-sounding statistic. One proposed progression begins with recognising your own name, then develops production, other names, simple instructions and more complex messages. Later exercises include asking somebody to pass an instruction to a third person. [3]

That last step matters. The learner has to follow who should do what, then carry the request onwards. A loud whistle alone won’t sort out the people involved.

The same materials teach what to do when understanding fails: request repetition, change the wording and add clarifying information. One example explains a house by referring to where you live. [3]

I rather like finding misunderstanding in the lesson plan. It gives us an exchange between people, with something to resolve. The glossy version in which every message sails flawlessly over every mountain would be a much less useful teacher.

A 2007 perception experiment supplies another reason for restraint. Meyer, Fanny Meunier and Laure Dentel tested 40 French-speaking students unfamiliar with whistled speech, split between two tasks. Participants selected which of four vowels they thought they heard; they received no correctness feedback. The isolated-vowel group averaged 55% correct, above the task’s 25% chance level. [4]

There is something recognisable in those sounds even for these newcomers. But choosing a vowel from four options, using selected recordings in a quiet room, is a very small piece of understanding a conversation. The experiment doesn’t show that you or I could decipher an unfamiliar whistled request across a valley.

Keeping people in the picture

The government’s education account dates the regulation of Silbo teaching to 1999, with a subsequent update in 2018. [5] UNESCO’s description of the 2009 heritage entry also places the practice in festivities, ceremonies and transmission from experienced whistlers to learners. [1]

These contexts matter to what is being kept alive. There are occasions to use it, people to learn from and reasons to answer. A school lesson can help create that relationship; a claim that an island has a remarkable communications system can’t do the teaching by itself.

Nor does an unfamiliar sound make a secure secret. The 2008 regional heritage account describes Silbo as public communication, accessible to people who know the system. [6] Being unintelligible to a passing visitor is a poor basis for promising privacy.

A detour to Professor Higgins

I’m taking us to Pygmalion (1938), Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard’s black-and-white film. Howard’s Professor Henry Higgins undertakes to transform Wendy Hiller’s Cockney Eliza Doolittle into someone accepted as a lady. Criterion’s account identifies teaching her speech as central to that project. [7][8]

The connection I’m making is about the purpose of learning. Higgins’s bet makes social acceptance the test of his teaching. The Silbo exercises we’ve looked at ask whether someone can recognise a name, convey a request and clear up a misunderstanding. Those are different standards of success.

I find the classroom’s permission to ask again rather more inviting than being cast as a professor’s triumph. A listener who needs clarification still belongs in the conversation.

That’s where I’d leave our whistle: with someone learning to answer it. The distance is impressive. The work of making yourself understood gives that distance a purpose.

References & Further Reading

The school examples describe a 2005 teaching proposal, rather than every present-day lesson or every whistler’s practice. Acoustic distinctions and a limited perception experiment are kept separate from claims about conversational fluency. The film comparison is Monocurator’s own; no historical connection between Pygmalion and Silbo Gomero is proposed.

1. UNESCO. “Whistled Language of the Island of La Gomera (Canary Islands), the Silbo Gomero.” Video & Sound Collections, documentary record, 2009. The accompanying written description and metadata were consulted; the video was not viewed.
2. Julien Meyer and Juan N. Casimiro. “Exploiting the Didactic Aspect of Whistled Speech in Gomero Spanish and Mazatec: Interactions between Phonetic Research and Education.” Language Design, special issue 2 (2008), pp. 57–64, especially pp. 58–60 and 63–64. Publisher PDF, full text consulted. The authors contest the two-vowel analysis.
3. Ramón Trujillo Carreño, Marcial Morera Pérez, Amador Guarro Pallás, Ubaldo Padrón Brito, Isidro Ortiz Mendoza, Rogelio Botanz Parra and Eugenio Darias Darias. El silbo gomero: Materiales didácticos. Gobierno de Canarias, Consejería de Educación, Cultura y Deportes, Dirección General de Ordenación e Innovación Educativa, June 2005. See Ortiz’s method, p. 63; the proposed learning progression, pp. 76–78; and clarification exercises, pp. 89–90. Spanish-language text; English descriptions are paraphrases.
4. Julien Meyer, Fanny Meunier and Laure Dentel. “Identification of Natural Whistled Vowels by Non-Whistlers.” Interspeech 2007, pp. 1593–96. DOI: 10.21437/Interspeech.2007-209. Full paper consulted; methods and Experiment A, pp. 1593–94.
5. Gobierno de Canarias, Consejería de Educación. “El Silbo Gomero. Materiales didácticos.” Education publication catalogue and collection overview, n.d. Historical teaching timeline, rather than a statement of current legal requirements.
6. Cabildo Insular de La Gomera. Resolution of 26 June 2008 initiating the cultural heritage declaration procedure for Silbo Gomero, annex, section 4. Boletín Oficial de Canarias, no. 142, item 2792, 16 July 2008. Consulted for its description of public communication, not as a final declaration or a definitive phonetic model.
7. The Criterion Collection. Pygmalion. Film synopsis and credits, n.d. Confirms directors, cast, 1938 and black-and-white format.
8. David Ehrenstein. “Pygmalion.” The Criterion Collection: Current, 18 September 2000. Distributor’s accompanying essay; consulted for the speech-teaching premise, not adopted as empirical evidence about class or audience responses.