Whistled languages are a valuable heritage of human culture.

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Geographical and cultural distribution
• Physical characteristics of the signal
• Linguistic considerations
• Cognitive processes
• Bioacoustical comparisons
• Endangered languages
• Conclusion
• References
• Table 1
• Figures

It has been stated that every individual who has been trained with the whistled language of La Gomera for about 3 years obviously reached a high global intelligibility, despite the simplicity of the signal (Luis Maestro, pers. comm. 2003). After sufficient training, for example, 95% of messages encoded by the 'Silbo' of La Gomera (Busnel et al. 1962b) and 80% of messages given by the 'Bai' tonal language of China were successfully understood (Xian-Ming 2002). A first study in neuroscience has shown that the Broca Area as well as the Wernicke Area were activated in well-trained listeners, but not in untrained ones, when they were presented with sentences composed of Silbo (Carreiras 2003).