Whistled speech examples
presented by the association of research "The World Whistles"
The Gavião hunters of Rondonia use sometimes whistled speech in the forest to coordinate from far while allowing human dialogue to go undetected by animals, a major advantage for approaching prey.The Gavião whistled speech emulates the tones of spoken speech. A video document showing this kind of use of whistled Gavião can be found in one of our article published in 2014 in the Journal Language Documentation & Conservation (Moore and Meyer 2014). The sentences pronounced during this dialogue are reported here (first in the Gavião phonemic alphabet devised by Moore - where an acute accent indicates a high tone (for example “á” for the vowel “a”) and a circumflex accent indicates a short rising tone (“â” above the vowel “a”) - next in the International Phonetic Alphabet – between brackets - to which we added a schematic representation of the pitch shape resulting from the tones that are used in this language – see above the vowels - , and finally translated in English):
Other animations and examples, click below:
- Cartoons and games with whistled speech
- A "Karaoke" in with sentences of a real conversation in whistled Greek
