Mazatecan Languages - Whistle Speech

Whistle Speech

Most Mazatec communities employ forms of whistle speech, in which linguistic utterances are produced by whistling the tonal contours of words and phrases. Mazatec languages lend themselves very well to becoming whistling languages because of the high functional load of tone in Mazatec grammar and semantics. Whistling is extremely common among young men who often have complex conversations conducted entirely through whistling. Women on the other hand do not generally use whistle speech, just as older males use it more rarely than younger ones. Small boys learn to whistle simultaneously with learning to talk. Whistling is generally used for communicating over a distance, to attract the attention of passersby or to avoid interfering with ongoing spoken conversations, but even economic transactions can be conducted entirely through whistling. Since whistle speech does not encode information about vowel or consonants but only tone, it is often ambiguous with several possible meanings; however since most whistling treats a limited number of topics it is normally unproblematic to disambiguate meaning through context.