======================================================================
= Silbo =
======================================================================
Introduction
======================================================================
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 oral phoneme-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
======================================================================
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. Those
born before 1950 were taught the language by their elders in their
homes, and those who attended or are attending school since 1999 were
taught it formally in school. Those born between 1950 and 1980
understand the language but are unable to speak it, as it was hardly
used and negatively viewed during their time of language acquisition.
Revitalization
======================================================================
When this medium of communication was endangered in the late 20th
century, revitalization efforts were generated at both community level
and governmental level. A combination of initiatives from the La
Gomeran community and policies implemented by the authorities saw
Silbo Gomero being revitalized and maintained as a cultural asset.
These revitalization efforts were well-documented by UNESCO as part of
the proceedings for the selection of the 2009 Representative List of
the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Community initiatives
=======================
In a bid to preserve Silbo Gomero for the island's youth, expert
whistlers sought to obtain permission to teach the language on a free
and voluntary basis at a dedicated centre. The initiative by the
senior islanders garnered encouraging responses, with parent-teacher
associations extending it to all schools. The first of many
revitalization measures was thus adopted at the grassroots level not
by public or private entities, which reflected the locals' attitude
toward Silbo Gomero. Education policies implemented later were
inspired as such, and revitalization began at the grassroots and
escalated to the highest government bodies.
Government policies
=====================
On 26 June 1997, the Parliament of the Canary Islands approved a
motion calling on the government to include Silbo Gomero as part of
the school curriculum. Silbo Gomero then became a mandatory subject in
primary and secondary education, as of July 1999. The provincial
government was supportive in its implementation of education policy
and also the establishment of a formalized Silbo Gomero curriculum
through the publication of 'El Silbo Gomero, Materiales didácticos'
('Educational Materials on the Silbo Gomero').
In addition to the compulsory learning of Silbo Gomero at the primary
and secondary level, an Island School of Silbo Gomero was established
for post-secondary students who wish to continue to train in Silbo
Gomero until they become accredited professional instructors. Students
of the Island School work to become capable of teaching Silbo Gomero
not only to their fellow citizens, but also to tourists who visit La
Gomera. This facilitates the sustainability of the revitalization and
also works towards language maintenance.
Thereafter, the Ministry of Education, Universities, Culture and Sport
of the Canary Islands developed a staff training plan in order to
ensure that the elderly expert whistlers can be replaced in the near
future by qualified professional teachers with relevant diplomas. This
comprised the provision of training courses on proficiency in and the
teaching of Silbo Gomero. The training plan was launched in 2007, with
the participation of 18 teachers.
Besides the implementation of education policies, the authorities also
sought to strengthen the corpus of Silbo Gomero by developing a
project to digitize all recorded audio material. Local, national and
worldwide distribution of documentaries on Silbo Gomero were also
made. The government also raised the status of Silbo Gomero by
selecting it via the National Historical Heritage Council to represent
Spain in the nominations for inclusion on the 2009 Representative List
of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Cultural heritage
===================
Members of the Gomeran community treasure Silbo Gomero as part of the
island's identity and use the whistled language in traditional rituals
and festivities on the island such as "bajadas", processions that are
dedicated to the Virgin or the patron saints of the community.
On 15 March 1999, Silbo Gomero was declared as part of the historical
ethnographic heritage of the Canary Islands. The annual celebration of
"School Encounters with Silbo Gomero" was also inaugurated in La
Gomera. In 2005, the monument to Silbo Gomero was inducted in
Garajonay National Park.
Features
======================================================================
According to different studies, Silbo Gomero has between two and four
vowels and between four and ten consonants. It is a whistled form of a
dialect of Canarian Spanish. Silbo replaces each vowel or consonant
with a whistling sound. Whistles are distinguished according to pitch
and continuity. As with other whistled forms of non-tonal languages,
Silbo works by retaining approximately the articulation of ordinary
speech and so "the timbre variations of speech appear in the guise of
pitch variations".
Silbo Gomero is a complex language to learn, with its whistling
techniques requiring physical precision and a strength of the body
parts producing the language that can be acquired only by practice.
Silbo Gomero uses the tongue, lips and hands and so differs greatly
from conventional language, which uses the mouth cavity to blend and
contrast several acoustic frequencies. The whistling mechanism, in
contrast, is limited to a single basic pitch between 1,000 and 3,000
hertz. The physical precision comes in the whistler's ability to vary
the frequencies at different speeds and start and stop the production
of the sound waves. The technique is handed down within La Gomera's
community, with unchanged teaching methods that date to the late 19th
century. Since the same pitch can represent many sounds, Silbo has
many fewer phonemes than Spanish. Therefore, communication can be
ambiguous; context and word choice are important for effective
communication.
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.
Vowels
Pitch General representation Vowels of the spoken language
represented
2600-2850 Hz /i/
2000-2500 Hz /e/
|1600-1800 Hz | |/a/
|1450-1700 Hz | |
In 1978, Ramón Trujillo of the University of La Laguna theorized that
Silbo Gomero has only two vowels. His work, containing almost 100
spectrograms, concludes that the language has two vowels and four
consonants. In Trujillo's work, Silbo's vowels are given one quality,
that of pitch, either high or low.
However, a more recent study gives a statistical analysis of Silbo's
vowels showing that four vowels are statistically distinguished in
production and perception. 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:
Consonants
Pitch General representation Consonants of the spoken language
represented
continuous high pitch , , , , , , and
broken high pitch , ,
continuous low pitch , , , and
broken low pitch and
The documentation on the official Silbo Gomero page on the UNESCO
website is in line with Trujillo's 1978 study. He suggested that
consonants are either rises or dips in the "melody line" that can be
broken or continuous. Further study by Meyer and Rialland suggests
that vowels are stripped to their inherent class of sound, which is
communicated in the whistle in these ways: voice ( vs ) is transmitted
by the whistled feature [-continuity]. A silent pause in the whistle
communicates [+voice] (), and a [+continuous] consonant gives the
quality [-voice] (). Placement of the consonant (dental, palatal,
fricative) is transmitted in whistle by the loci, the sharpness or
speed, of the formant transitions between vowels. Consonant classes
are simplified into four classes. Extra high loci (near vertical
formant loci) denotes affricates and stridents, rising loci denotes
alveolar, medial (loci just above the vowel formant) denotes palatal,
and falling (low loci) denotes pharyngeal, labial, and fricative. This
gives eight whistled consonants, but including tone gradual decay
(with intensity falling off) as a feature on continuous and
interrupted sounds gives 10 consonants. In these situations gradual
decay is given [+voice], and continuous is given [+liquid].
The representation of is treated as a broken high pitch in Silbo
though in the spoken language, is a continuous high pitch consonant.
There are two reasons for the anomaly. One is that in functional
terms, is high in frequency and thus extremely useful. Also , as the
continuous high-pitched consonant of Silbo already represents many
other consonants of the spoken language (, , , , , , and ), it would
be very confusing to add to that list. Thus, as the broken
high-pitched consonant does not fully represent and , it can
represent the frequently-used .
Cognitive features
====================
Studies have shown that Silbo Gomero speakers process the whistled
register in the same way as standard spoken language. Studies by
Manuel Carreiras of the University of La Laguna and David Corina of
the University of Washington published in 2004 and 2005 involved two
participant groups of Spanish-speakers. One group spoke Silbo, and the
other did not. Results obtained from monitoring the participants'
brain activity by functional magnetic resonance imaging show that
while non-speakers of Silbo merely process Silbo as whistling,
Silbo-speakers process the sounds in the same linguistic centres of
the brain as those that process Spanish sentences.
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.
External links
======================================================================
* [
http://silbo-gomero.com/ silbo-gomero.com] - Jeff Brent's homepage
* [
http://cognews.com/1069225595/index_html Silbo Gomero - The
Whistling Language]. .
*
[
http://Silbo-Gomero.com/mp3s/BBC-SilboGomeroInterview-8-26-08-JeffBrent-IsidroOrtiz.mp3
BBC4 interviews Isidro Ortiz & J.Brent - 26 August 2008]
License
=========
All content on Gopherpedia comes from Wikipedia, and is licensed under CC-BY-SA
License URL:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbo
