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