On one Canary island, a whole language is whistled

On La Gomera in the Canary Islands, locals can hold a conversation without speaking a word. Silbo Gomero is a whistled register of Castilian Spanish: its speakers replace the five Spanish vowels with two distinct whistles and consonants with four more, modulating pitch and interruption to encode meaning.

The language evolved to defeat the island’s terrain. Sound that would be lost as ordinary speech carries as a piercing whistle across the deep ravines, letting messages travel up to five kilometres from ridge to ridge — far faster than walking the valleys.

Almost lost in the late 20th century, Silbo was made a compulsory school subject in 1999, and in 2009 UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It is the only whistled language fully developed and practised by a large community, understood today by almost all of the island’s inhabitants.