Whistled languages exist on every inhabited continent – now some scientists think similar dialects could have preceded the spoken word
For centuries, shepherds from the small village of Aas in the French Pyrenees led their sheep and cattle up to mountain pastures for the summer months. To ease the solitude, they would communicate with each other or with the village below in a whistled form of the local Gascon dialect, transmitting and receiving information accurately over distances of up to 10 kilometres.
They “spoke” in simple phrases – “What’s the time?”, “Come and eat,”, “Bring the sheep home” – but each word and syllable was articulated as in speech. Outsiders often mistook the whistling for simple signalling (“I’m over here!”), and the irony, says linguist and bioacoustician Julien Meyer of Grenoble Alpes University in France, is that the world of academia only realised its oversight around the middle of the 20th century, just as the whistled language of Aas was dying on the lips of its last speakers.
