Mexico, especially in the south, is home to a wide variety of Indian languages. In the remote cloud forest in the mountains of the state of Oaxaca, native people speak tonal languages and over the centuries used whistling to communicate across their vast mountainside lands. A few whistlers still practice their ancient tongue.
Funding for In the Americas with David Yedman was provided by Agnes Howery. Music The state of Oaxaca is home to a bewildering array of native peoples. There are 16 distinct ethnic groups speaking 62 different languages.
Some of them communicate by a sophisticated form of whistling. Whistling They live in a remote section of the northwestern part of the state, high up in the clouds. There's a greater diversity in Oaxaca than in all of Europe. Some of the groups have only a few speakers remaining. Others have hundreds of thousands.
Their homelands range from the Pacific coast to the Central Valleys. to the humid foothills of the Gulf of Mexico. This valley in northern Oaxaca is what Oaxacans refer to as La Cañada.
For at least 20 centuries, it's been a major trade route between central Mexico and southern Mexico. Vámonos. From the valley bottom, we climb to the high Sierras to the east. Here I meet up with linguist Mark Ziccoli.
He's come all the way from Alaska to document the whistling. Here's Oaxaca. Cricallons up here.
Up to Cuicatlán. And then we go east into San Pedro, Xochipan. San Pedro, Xochipan.
There's three Cuicatec towns that we're going to go through before we get into the Chinantec area. We've got to go over 10,000 feet. We have to go over the divide.
Yeah, it's pretty high. Oaxaca is one series of high mountain ranges after another, and any roads that cross are an unending sequence of hairpin turns, curves that seem to go on forever, plummeting and rising abruptly. On the east side of these mountains, the moisture that comes in from the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic gets trapped, sometimes for months at a time.
So here we are in Tsoi Siapa and this is, this used to be cloud forest and boy you can see why. It's not the desert we saw on the other side of the range. It's the dry season over there. It's not going to rain again until probably April.
That's what they said. But on this side of the divide, it's been raining since we got here. It rains all the time.
We've got to find out how many people actually speak the whistled speech, if any of them do. Whether old people, young people, how much they know, how far they can talk. It's a big question for me. San Pedro Sochiapan is a town of about 300 families, or probably around 1,500 people.
It's a Chinantec community. Everybody in town speaks Chinantec. A smaller portion of them can control whistled speech.
For instance, whistled speech is something that the men do, the women can understand, but you don't hear women doing it out in the community. And of the men, there's a smaller set of the men who can do it. The elder men can carry on conversations in whistled speech.
Some of them, not all of them. You hear a lot of whistling among the youth. A lot of it means, come here, or where are you going? Now, a subset of the youth can actually do more things like the older men can do, and they can actually whistle conversations and new things.
Well, the Chinantecos country is pretty wild and wet and rugged. I guess we're at a... About 4,000 feet here after crossing 10,000 feet.
Yeah, this is what's called Highland Chinantec. There's three main groups. There's highland, there's kind of a lower level mid-group, and then there's a lowland group. None of them can understand each other, the three different, I mean they're different languages.
It's been talked about as six different languages or as many as fourteen. It's a family of languages. So what we do know is that almost everybody speaks the language, Chinantecan. And there are a lot of people who don't speak Spanish.
There are, you'll find both older men and women who don't speak Spanish. But all the children here speak Chinantecan. They have sounds in that language that I can't even begin to appreciate. approximately.
and learn Spanish here. So which one do they choose? They start in kindergarten, teaching them Spanish, and as they get to first grade, it becomes all Spanish. So the trend in the area is one by one, the towns are losing the Chinantec. The children are not speaking it after a while.
It's sort of a function of what the parents speak, but more important, what the peers speak. And if the peers speak Spanish, the kids don't want to speak what is in their house. They want to speak what their associate, their friends speak. And that's how languages really do get lost. This is something that's in decline here within this community.
It's not done as it was in the past. Ah, yes, I heard it. It's Spanish, and then it says what to eat, but it's Chifido, Chinanteco. It's Chinanteco, huh? The older men are saying that the youth aren't doing it like they were doing it.
It used to be much more productive. It was much more integrated in the community. And in cases of language death, the language doesn't just die all at once. That's very rare.
It dies bits and pieces at a time. Whistled speech is a part of the Chinantec language here, and it is one thing that's going out before the language itself is. You can see why in this town it's just up and down.
Whistle speech might be a real advantage. It could take a half hour to walk to another place in town and convey a message that you can do in 30 seconds of whistle speech. This is Marcelino's house here. Let's turn in. And he really is...
who knows both spoken language and the whistle language according to what you've told me. Marcelino! I'm going to go. We talked about anything, for example, calling our friends, we're going to eat fruit, we're going to cut mangoes down there, down in the village. And if we wanted to...
If it was another partner, we would tell him to go and call the other one. Just whistling. And if it's a place where you can't hear, but when you get there, you whistle behind the house and it's over. There are three, for example...
Oh... If he's talking to someone else, a little whistle like this. But if it's a little more distant, like... then it's a little more relaxed.
And if it's a little longer than where Victor is, Victoriano, It goes all the way up there, where the horse is. And if it goes all the way up there, where the milpa is, that's the strongest whistle. He said to him, what are you going to do tomorrow noon?
Then he replied, well, nothing. He said, I'm just going to take a nap. I'm going to take a nap in the middle of the day. Siama na haqqu qianunere. Si estamos hablando con una persona que está en su milpa, entonces sabe esa persona que yo no puedo hablarle otra cosa que no sea de lo que puedes haber en la milpa.
¿Qué quiere decir? Siama qa haqqu qianunere. Entonces me dice...
Yes. We're going back to town, he says. He says, let's go back to town.
I think he's had enough of it out here. They also said their lips are getting tired. They're not accustomed to the whistling the way they used to. So it's like playing a musical instrument after you haven't played for a number of years.
So their lips are getting tired from all the whistling. Boy, there's been a lot of changes here in the last 10 years. We've found that out since we got here. Apparently the whistle speech was so integrated into the social life of the community that it was a coming-of-age right. When men turned 18, they would have to learn how to whistle, and they would be tested.
And if they actually did, they would have to learn how to whistle. I understand if they couldn't pass, they got fined when they got to meetings. They had to do it. That's only 10 years ago. Yeah.
And we also find that all the meetings of town, and a lot of them were summoned by whistling. That's changed. Yeah, that hasn't been done in years now.
In a small town like San Pedro Funchalpan, anytime there's a wedding, everybody knows about it and everybody wants to get involved. Some people don't want to have to sit through a mass that takes two hours, but everybody is going to go to the reception. The most amazing part of the whole thing is how the bride and groom can sit through that two-hour mass, come out, get into a truck in the middle of all this mud, and leave without a touch of mud on their clothing. One of the things about language loss is that one generation may give up a language only for the next generation to then re-find it, re-discover it as something that's valuable. This is happening to a lot of indigenous languages in different parts of the world.
And so part of the work that we're doing here is creating documentation of this phenomenon, of the whistled speech, how does it work, how does it relate to the spoken Chinin tech. And then these documents, these recordings, the transcriptions that we write it down with, can be used by another generation if they want to bring it back. This is the same sentence, whistled, and this is the same sentence spoken. Oh my goodness, so it's as if they're using the same tone structure, speaking and whistling. Yeah, so this is the whistled speech and this is the spoken speech and you can...
See how parallel they are. They even rise and fall in the same place, and the timing is all the same. And you can actually count the syllables, because they're not just whistling the pitches.
There's the pitch, there's how many syllables or the structure of the syllables that there is, and then there's the stress that's being whistled. But this really simplifies it and shows you why they're able to whistle it. But also, you can see that they are, in fact, whistling the speech. That really is.
That demonstrates. See, in English, if I want to whistle, I have a dog. I can't do it.
Well, that could be anything in the world. That could be a lot of things. It can't be just anything in the world in Chinanteco.
It works this well in tonal languages like this, and Chinanteco is very tonal. It has seven different tones, plus all these stress contrasts and everything. There's more than 20 different melodic contrasts that are being whistled here.
We should make it only. impossible for a person like me to learn. It would make it very difficult.
So Dave, last time I was in Sochiapon, I did some experiments to test how well whistled speech could be understood and if it could be used outside of regular contexts that are used out in the fields here. So I created a map navigation task, so that one person had a map and a course through that map, and without the other person seeing what they were doing, they used whistles to navigate the other person through this map. Giving instructions then by whistling. And so what this file has is the two video files, the audio file.
I worked with Marcelino to basically transpose the whistled speech into the spoken Chinatech. which it's based on. Okay, so here you have the spoken Chinantec line, and then that's translated into Spanish and translated into English. This makes up part of the archive that I'm developing for this whistled speech.
This was rather successful in that they started at one place and they got to the end place, moving through the city streets. Just by him giving instructions by whistling? Yes. What I want to do while we're here today is replicate this experiment to see if we can do it again. And with a different person, too.
With different people. There might be a question of literacy for some of the participants, and so we have the words here in Spanish, but we're also putting some drawings across for the church, some fruit for the market, a bus for the bus station, so that we can, and then we're giving a starting point here. Now we're going to put a root on one of these to follow. There's something symbolic about it. this test being done on a ping pong table with the participants, one sitting on each side of the table and one side of where a net would be.
This is a high-tech linguistic ping pong game. So each one One of these gets a map of this imaginary town. Mark is giving the instructions to Marcelino. Then Marcelino's job is to whistle the instructions to Pedro. Meow When he got to the end, Marcelino said to him, you've arrived at the coral?
He said, yes. He said, and there you can see your horse. Difficulty that Pedro had is a reflection of some of the very subtle differences in language. Imagine in English. If you and I are driving somewhere and you say, do I want to turn left here?
And I say, right. Well, I mean, you do want to turn left here, but I said right, and you might interpret that to say you want me to turn right, or are you saying right? Correct.
Correct, and we can say correct, but in whistling, it's hard to correct your mistake. But he got to the end, and that was the important thing. La re.
La re. La re quiere decir ya. Ya terminó.
So each time they reach the end of what they want to say, in their language they say re, and in their whistling they... And the Quetzalapas don't use the Erey intonation. They just say...
...panos. So it's a very locally developed vocabulary and musical ability and intonation. Very confusing and marvelous. So the people from the other town sound very harsh. And for the people in Xochipan, their intonation is very smooth and sweet.
It's like the foreigners speak a language that doesn't sound good. I don't think they have the umbrellas every day, but they must have to carry them at the ready because they get 80 to 100 inches of rain maybe that much a year here. ¿Cómo se llama?
¿Vamos a la escuela? ¡Todo! Y chiflando. Gracias.
Yo tengo un perro. Y chiflando. Even at this age, they can take what they know about the melody of the language and put it into listens. But did you notice, I think, that only the little boys answered?
The people that I've talked to said that women can understand it, but don't do it. Yeah, that sounds right. So there's some rule somewhere that says, okay, that's not something women do.
The traditional place for women is in the private space of the home, and they're in charge. They are the masters of that. But you find that it's the men that go out into the public space.
There'd be no need for whistling in the home, because you're right there, you can talk. Well, it's an intimate, it's a closed space. Out in public, you have the authorities of the town, people go into different directions to go and work, and the whistling is used there.
So it seems to be a public-private divide, which maps onto the gender, or which the gender is mapped onto. You feel like a Pied Piper? Well, I feel like if we walk into the municipal building, building we might run into the police and have a problem. What does the future hold for Tsuchiyopan Whistle Speech?
I've learned in my interaction with the community here that whistle speech has gone from something which was everyday and pervasive throughout the community and used all the time, what was normal. To now being something that could be considered ritual or special, it's something that you hear in much fewer contexts. It used to be that all of the police needed to know whistled speech because that was how they got together. how they responded to emergency situations.
That's not done anymore. Walkie-talkies are used. People use watches and work on schedules rather than coming to town when they're called by whistles.
How long will it be around? It'll be around a little while longer, and how the community responds to valuing whistle speech will determine whether it's a long while or a little while. But the way it looks now, it may be gone in this community within 10 years. The work in Sochi Apan with whistle speech was to learn about some differences that a long distance communication like whistle speech has when compared to intimate face-to-face communication that I normally study.
Well, it's sure easier on the vocal cords. You can whistle much louder and travel much farther than you can when you're shouting, for instance. This whistled speech also has some things in it that the spoken language doesn't have. Like it has a little particle at the end of each sentence that means something like...
like over means in radio communication. Oh yeah, they always go down at the end. And that means over, Roger.
That means I just finished talking. We're right now exchanging glances and exchanging information through other means. Our gestures, our glances at each other.
And we can tell when one sentence is about to end and it's time for somebody else to take a turn. But you can't do that when somebody's half a kilometer away. That makes it a lot harder. So something is taking up the space. slack in the whistle.
So the whistle speech has things that the spoken language doesn't have. Right. If you want to find people who can whistle as well as talk, you have to climb the slopes of the Sierra Juarez into the damp, foggy, cloudy eastern side. That's where you'll find the last whistlers.
Istanbul, not Constantinople, so if you've a date, Constantinople, she'll be waiting in Istanbul. Even old New York was once New Amsterdam. Why they changed it, I can't say. People just like it better that way. Take me back to Constantinople.
No, you can't go back to Constantinople, because it's Istanbul, not Constantinople. Why did Constantinople get the words? It's not what it is, it's what the church.
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