Regular Spanish speakers who aren’t whistlers just recognize it as whistling.īy the 1970s and 80s, there were only a few whistlers remaining, but at the end of the 90s there was renewed interest in silbo, in part because of an initiative to make it a compulsory subject at primary school:Īdmittedly, this has been an unusual segue into a brief discussion of a breed we nearly lost, but we couldn’t resist sharing Silbo Gomero with you, and the handsome breed that was developed at a nearby island. Intangible, maybe, but one study showed that silbo is recognized in the “language center” of the brain by silbo whistlers. In 2009, UNESCO declared it to be a part of the Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Today, it’s a phoneme substitution that emulates Spanish phonology through a reduced set of whistled phonemes. Though the Guanche language died out around the 17 th century, the whistling endured and was widespread as late as the 1940s and 50s. The language is called “Silbo Gomero.” Long before Spanish settlement, it was originally used by the Guanches, the aboriginal people of the Islands who used it to communicate across hills, valleys, and ravines. It also has a language that consists entirely of whistles. ![]() Marked by craggy volcanic mountains, banana trees, dense forests of ferns, and moss covered trees, it looks like the land that time forgot. La Gomera is the second-smallest and third least populous of the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |