18 Facts About Silbo Gomero

Silbo Gomero, known as el silbo, is a whistled register of Spanish used by inhabitants of La Gomera in the Canary Islands, historically used to communicate across the deep ravines and narrow valleys that radiate through the island.

Silbo Gomero is a transposition of Spanish from speech to whistling.

In 1976 Silbo Gomero barely remained on el Hierro, where it had flourished at the end of the 19th century.

Silbo Gomero then became a mandatory subject in primary and secondary education, as of July 1999.

Besides the implementation of education policies, the authorities sought to strengthen the corpus of Silbo Gomero by developing a project to digitize all recorded audio material.

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The government raised the status of Silbo Gomero by selecting the whistled language of La Gomera via the National Historical Heritage Council to represent Spain in the nominations for inclusion on the 2009 Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

On 15 March 1999, Silbo Gomero was declared as part of the historical ethnographic heritage of the Canary Islands.

Silbo Gomero is not only used between Gomerans; visitors to the island have the opportunity to be exposed to the whistled language too, in restaurants which provide whistling demonstrations for tourists.

Silbo Gomero is a complex language to learn, with its whistling techniques requiring physical precision, and a strength of the body parts used in mechanism of the language, that can only be acquired with practice.

Silbo Gomero uses the tongue, lips and hands of the users, differing greatly from conventional language, which uses the mouth cavity to blend and contrast several acoustic frequencies.

Vowels of Silbo Gomero are described roughly as sustained lines of high and low frequency that are distinct from each other.

The theory that Silbo Gomero has only two vowels was theorised by Ramon Trujillo of the University of La Laguna in his published book "EL SILBO GOMERO analisis linguistico" in 1978.

Silbo Gomero's work, containing almost a hundred spectrograms, concludes in a theory that there are only two vowels and four consonants in the Silbo Gomero language.

In Trujillo's work Silbo Gomero's vowels are given one quality, that of pitch, being either high or low.

However, in a more recent study, the work of Julien Meyer gives a statistical analysis of the vowels of Silbo Gomero showing that there are 4 vowels statistically distinguished in production and that they are perceived so.

Also in 2005, Annie Rialland of the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle published an acoustic and phonological analysis of Silbo Gomero based on new materials, showing that, not only gliding tones, but intensity modulation plays a role in distinguishing different whistled sounds.

Consonants in Silbo Gomero are modifications of the vowel-based “melody line” or “vocal line”.

Secondly, as the continuous high-pitched consonant of Silbo Gomero already represents many other consonants of the spoken language, it would be very confusing to add on to the extensive list.