Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Volga bomb here. When you, a
Speaker 1: human want to audibly communicate with another human, you generally
Speaker 1: use your voice. A speech happens when air passes through
Speaker 1: your larynx or voice box and is added to noises
Speaker 1: made with your throat, nasal passages, sinuses, and mouth. This
Speaker 1: is a great way to communicate, but there are some drawbacks.
Speaker 1: Of course, there are people who have trouble making those
Speaker 1: noises or hearing them due to any number of conditions.
Speaker 1: But that aside. Let's take the particular instance of your
Speaker 1: living on a mountain side and a friend living one
Speaker 1: slope over. Just shouting to each other isn't always that effective.
Speaker 1: For one thing, shouting creates a lot of echoes, among
Speaker 1: them nooks and crannies of mountain slopes, and the average
Speaker 1: outdoor range of an intelligible human voice is only about
Speaker 1: five nine feet or on naighty meters under normal conditions.
Speaker 1: Short of walking over to where your friend lives to
Speaker 1: carry on a conversation at a reasonable speaking distance, or
Speaker 1: communicating with some sort of visual technique, your next best
Speaker 1: bet is to whistle. Whistling is the product of air
Speaker 1: being forced through a small hole made by your lips.
Speaker 1: A whistle is different from your voice because it's clear
Speaker 1: and the frequency is narrow and high pitched. The sound
Speaker 1: of a whistle can carry for more than five miles
Speaker 1: or eight kilometers, and it holds its form, while a
Speaker 1: shout can splinter into an echoing mess and birds have
Speaker 1: discovered this and use it to communicate between treetops and
Speaker 1: mountain sides the world over. So although humanity has relied
Speaker 1: on spoken language for millennia to accomplish every day face
Speaker 1: to face communication, there are more than seventy groups around
Speaker 1: the world that engage in special whistled languages. Millions of
Speaker 1: people speak them, although the advent of text messaging has
Speaker 1: so only seen a dive in whistled language worldwide. They're
Speaker 1: most commonly found in mountainous regions where shepherds or farmers
Speaker 1: need to pass messages around without huffing and puffing up
Speaker 1: and down hills to do so, but whistles are also
Speaker 1: used to communicate through the impenetrable undergrowth of the Amazon
Speaker 1: rainforest and are useful to the Inuit at sea as well.
Speaker 1: The hunters can use whistling to speak to each other
Speaker 1: in a way that won't alarm their prey the way
Speaker 1: that voice produced language bight. Whistled languages have even been
Speaker 1: useful in battle among soldiers fighting on the same side.
Speaker 1: For the article, this episode is based on How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: Spoke with Julian Mayer, a researcher at the University of
Speaker 1: Grenoble in France and author of Whistled Languages, a worldwide
Speaker 1: inquiry on human whistled speech. He said, the most fascinating
Speaker 1: thing about whistled languages is their bird like aspect, which
Speaker 1: encodes the complexity of human languages while highlighting a tight
Speaker 1: relation between human language and the ironment. He explained, when
Speaker 1: whistled language is still present, it signals that traditional activities
Speaker 1: are still commonly practiced and therefore a relationship with the
Speaker 1: land is maintained. According to Mayer, whistled languages are commonly
Speaker 1: based on the spoken language native to an area. For instance,
Speaker 1: in southern China, where diversity of whistled languages is high,
Speaker 1: spoken language is tonal, that is to say, the constants
Speaker 1: and vowels decide the meaning of a word, as well
Speaker 1: as the pitch. The whistle languages in this part of
Speaker 1: China seem to match the musicality of the local speech,
Speaker 1: and the pitch of the whistle can change the meaning
Speaker 1: of a whistled sentence in places where the language is
Speaker 1: not tonal, like in the mountainous Canary Island off the
Speaker 1: coast of Spain, where a whistled language called seal bow
Speaker 1: Camarrow is spoken. Spanish acts as a template for the
Speaker 1: sounds used. The vowel sounds are mirrored in the shape
Speaker 1: of the whistles, while constants are decided by the clip,
Speaker 1: cadence and slides of the whistled tones. To hear it,
Speaker 1: it seems wild that anyone would be able to understand
Speaker 1: seal bogamarrow at all, but according to Mayer, whistled language
Speaker 1: speakers around the world are found to be able to
Speaker 1: understand about of what's communicated. Mayor conjectures that people are
Speaker 1: able to understand whistled language for the same reason that
Speaker 1: you can read a sentence full of words whose letters
Speaker 1: have been jumbled. Our brains are desperate to make sense
Speaker 1: of what's going on. Whistled languages have some neuroscientists rethinking
Speaker 1: how language works in the brain. It's been commonly thought
Speaker 1: that language is the exclusive purview of the left hemisphere
Speaker 1: of the brain, but studies of whistled language speakers found
Speaker 1: that these languages are handled by both sides of the brain,
Speaker 1: much like music. Today's episode is based on the article
Speaker 1: just put your lips together and blow how whizzled Language
Speaker 1: his work on how stuff works dot Com. Written by
Speaker 1: Jesslyn Shields. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio in partnership with how stuff Works dot Com and
Speaker 1: is produced by Tyler klang Ur. More podcasts from my
Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.