anatomical whistle, whistling

​Whistling system used by the Lokele people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, described in Carrington (1944). The system is either performed “with the lips” or with a whistle fashioned from a fruit, with two contrastive pitches “about a minor third apart” (540). Most commonly used by young people. Evidently, “[e]xactly the same system of message transmission as that in use on the two-toned slit drum bouŋgu is used for transmitting information… by whistling”.​

Carrington, J. F. (1976). The Drum Language of the Lokele Tribe. In T. A. Sebeok & J. Umiker-Sebeok, Speech Surrogates: Drum and Whistle Systems. 1976. (pp. 591–668). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110804423-001