Phonetics, Phonology and Typology of Whistled Languages

Abstract

By considerably expanding the range of involved languages, our study not only reveals the significant diversity of the phenomenon but also offers the possibility of tracing its essential typological distinctions and their implications for both speech processing and phonology. In this chapter, we will provide a general sketch of the phonetic and phonological strategies employed by traditional whistlers to transpose their language into whistles. We will also deepen the previous analyses on this subject. Throughout our inquiry, the most notable similarities between otherwise unrelated whistled languages have been observed in a wide range of tonal languages (e.g., Hmong, Akha, Mixtec, Mazatec, Gavião, Suruí, Ewe) and non-tonal languages (e.g., Greek, Turkish, Spanish, Béarnese) which were found to respectively follow either pitch-based or formant-based whistling strategies. These concepts have been introduced in Chap. 2 and they are now described in details. We have selected a large diversity of languages (Greek, Spanish of both La Gomera and Andalusia, Turkish, Chepang, Siberian Yupik, Wayãpi, Tamazight, Gavião and Hmong) to provide a typological overview of whistled forms of languages. We identify a small group of languages that adopt intermediate strategies and where whistlers apparently found a balance between the contribution of pitch and formants to whistled emulations of speech (e.g., Chepang, Siberian Yupik). The systematic comparison of the spoken and whistled forms of speech in various languages enables us to show how pitch-based, formant-based and intermediate whistled transposition strategies adapt to the phonemic inventories of each particular language. We also argue here that the whistled form of a language doesn't define a phonemic system independent from the spoken form in spite of the phonetic reduction at play. Whistled speech recognition is not essentially different from whispered speech recognition or degraded speech recognition. The original version of this chapter contained errors which have been corrected. These are detailed in the erratum to be found under