A group of shepherds on La Gomera in the Canary Islands communicate with each other by whistling. Now, researchers at the University of Washington say that functional magnetic resonance imaging reveals that the shepherds' brains process the whistled language, called the Silbo Gomero, in the same way spoken languages are processed. From a Reuters report:
When the whistlers listened to Silbo sentences, regions in the left side of their brain were activated, including areas linked to language production and comprehension, along with a region in the right hemisphere thought to be associated with linguistic processing….
The Silbo, which is thought to have been brought to the island by Berbers from North Africa, condenses Spanish into two vowels and four consonants.
Whistled languages are also used in Greece, Turkey, China and Mexico, according to (researcher David) Corina.
