whistling

Whistling system used by the Siberian Yupik people of St. Lawrence Island, located in the Bering Strait west of Alaska, described by Meyer (2008; 2015). Whistlers uses the bilabial or two-fingered techniques. The language is not tonal, but has a prominent, complex system of stressed syllables. It also has a large consonant inventory. Whistled pitch appears to encode a combination of vowel quality, stress/prosody and formant transitions associated with consonants (Meyer 2015, 125).According to Meyer (2015), "some families still use whistling ... in the village or in their camp sites in summer"; historically hunters also whistled for communication on boats while hunting marine mammals (40).

Meyer, J. (2008). Acoustic strategy and typology of whistled languages; phonetic comparison and perceptual cues of whistled vowels. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 38: 69-94.,Meyer, J. (2015). Whistled Languages: A Worldwide Inquiry on Human Whistled Speech. Springer.