Canary Island 2nd Language: Whistling

Whistling is a second language on La Gomera, one of the seven Canary Islands.

When a farmer on the mountainous island in Spain’s Atlantic archipelago wants to talk to a friend across a deep valley, he just puts his lips together and blows.

Appropriately enough, those engaged in such long-distance conversations sound like canaries--with megaphones.

“You can say anything by whistling and if the weather’s good you can hear it 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) away,” said Domingo Darias Padron, a burly 50-year-old who learned the silbo as a boy from his father, a farm laborer.

The small island with just 18,000 inhabitants, swathed with banana plantations and bristling with palm trees, is one of the least developed in the archipelago.

The tiny capital San Sebastian dozes beside the sparkling blue Atlantic. Christopher Columbus made it his last stop on the way to the New World, which was symbolically baptized with water from a well in the town’s Customs House.

On a hill high above the town Domingo, his brother Jose and Paulino Herrera give a private demonstration of the island’s unique form of communication whose origins are uncertain.

The principle is simple. Each letter in the alphabet has an equivalent whistle-sound, but the words rush out from between their lips fast and fluently, bending and arching and changing in pitch just like bird song.

It requires a high degree of skill and five years to learn.

Paulino whistles to Domingo “Do you want a beer?” and Domingo immediately whistles back, “No, I don’t feel like a beer right now.”

“Have you ever been to Madrid, Domingo?” Paulino whistles on request. “Yes, I was there last year but I didn’t like it. Everyone’s crazy there,” comes back the whistled reply.

The whistlers can get their lips round any word you like, including modern terms such as “computer” or “record player” and swearwords--Domingo readily whistled one choice expletive.

Some say the silbo was learned from the indigenous Guanches before they became extinct shortly after conquest by Spain in the 15th Century.

But it was widely used by peasants in the island’s mountainous interior, growing their crops on man-made terraces that cling to the slopes, before the advent of roads and modern communication.

“Today it’s used less because there are telephones and highways but in the old days two peasants would be working the land and they had to say things to each other by whistling because there was no other way of communicating,” said Paulino.

“There’s no code with a key or anything like that,” explains Paulino. “It’s just a whistled conversation.”

But the silbo has its use in modern life as well. Walk around San Sebastian and you hear neighbors whistling messages to each other and women whistling their husbands in to dinner.

“The other day Domingo was down on the beach with the van collecting stones and we needed him,” said Paulino. “So instead of having to go all the way down to speak to him we just whistled to him to come.”

Domingo demonstrated the effectiveness of the silbo over a distance by whistling to a friend more than half a mile away down in the town. The man stopped dead in his tracks, looked up, and whistled a curt reply.

And just as speech is accented, each town on Gomera has an accent for whistling.

“You can tell where someone’s from by their accent when they whistle,” said Paulino. “They whistle like they talk, so in Hermigua (in the north of Gomera) they talk more slowly so they whistle more drawn out.”

Locals are worried that the silbo is dying out. Domingo estimates that only 5% of locals can now whistle with any fluency.

But drive around the island’s heartland, through the lush cedar forests of the Garajonay National Park, and the silbo whistles on.

Meanwhile in San Sebastian the silbo is doggedly adapting itself to the trials of modern urban life.

“I whistled a rude suggestion to a girl one carnival,” said Paulino. “She whistled back, ‘Go to hell.’ ”