whistling, whistled speech, wahuʔ

Whistling system used by the Abuʔ people of the Toricelli region in Papua New Guinea, described by Nekitel (1985, 1992). Whistling is bilabial (sa-a-da bokotoh) or between cupped hands (s-u-hafur lakuh). The language is not tonal, and the system (waluhuʔ in Abuʔ) encodes the prosody of a set of fixed signals in the spoken language. It is reported verbally in an abridged form, itself used as a shouted language: "'waluhu' is typically marked by a series of abrupt short or prolonged syllabic utterances which are 'trimmed down' approximants of the syllabic nuclei of their spoken forms.'" (Nekitel, 1985, 181). But a number of items are longer than and share few constituents with the standard form of spoken language; for instance, the waluhu' sequence corresponding to standard Abu' alemam 'men' is reported verbally as 'a-'u-'u-wa:-ha:'. In at least some cases where signals have more constituents than in the spoken language, Nekitel (1992) attributes this to an enphrasing procedure: "there are certain waluhuʔ pitches that exhibit more than just a one-to-one correspondence between a whistled pitch and the syllable or phoneme of the base utterance... It can only be inferred from contextual experiences that these additional pitches probably convey other ellipted information"; e.g., he suggests that the six-note signal for asah 'rain' literally corresponds to Asah ha-a-ha?i 'the rain came/is coming' (Nekitel, 1992, p. 304-5). The other discrepancies seem to involve surrogate-specific signal vocabulary; Nekitel describes the system as a "special code". Glottal stops appear in the whistling system, which are "not too well understood... There is some indication that it seems to function as a substitute for many of the omitted consonants that would be there if the same call were translated morpheme by morpheme into spoken speech" (1985, 178).The system is mostly practiced by men. The cupped-hand style is more "strenuous" and is limited to a few waluhu' specialists.Content includes "casual non-formal communication" at a distance.

Nekitel, O. M. (1992). A perceptual analysis of Abu/-Wam Whistled Speech. In C. Donald, D.T. Laycock, M. Ross, D. Tryon (Eds.), The language Game: Papers in Memory (pp. 299-311). Cambera: Pacific Linguistics.,Nekitel, O. M. (1985). Sociolinguistic aspects of Abu’, a Papuan lanquage of the Sepik area. https://doi.org/10.25911/5d723dfcf2f5a