Whistled speech Silbo Gomero

The paper describes the whistled speech Silbo Gomero, a special kind of communication which is being used in the inside part of the island of Gomera, in the Canary Islands archipelago. Besides the usual, spoken speech, its speakers use a system of whistles to pronounce Spanish words. In that area, the whistled speech was created in the pre-Hispanic period in order to make possible the transferring of messages to the great distances, and it was adopted by Spanish-speaking inhabitants afterwards. Different kinds of whistled speeches have been developed for other languages in the other parts of the world. There have been described whistled speeches that transpose formants (in non-tone languages) and those that transpose tone (in tone languages). In the Silbo Gomero whistled speech the vowels are represented by longer whistles, while the fast brakes between them represent the consonants. Since the whistles don't have the expressive possibilities as wide as the spoken speech does, the whistled speech has a phonemic system of two basic vocals and four consonants, but in spite its reduction, it still manages to convey the message.