IELTS Academic Reading – Practice Passage 6

Reading Passage

AIn a handful of mountain communities scattered around the world, a conversation may be conducted entirely in whistles. To a visitor the sound seems to belong to the same family as a shepherd’s call or a ship’s siren – a small set of agreed signs, each standing for a fixed message. It is nothing of the kind. The whistlers are speaking their ordinary language: Spanish on one island, Turkish in one valley, a local tongue elsewhere. The whistle simply takes the place of the voice, and whole sentences that have never been used before can be produced and understood. Somebody who does not speak the underlying language hears only a tune; somebody who does can learn, with practice, to hear sentences in it.

BWhat makes this possible, and also what limits it, is the narrowness of the channel. The human voice carries information along several paths at once – the resonances of the mouth, the buzz of the vocal folds, the noise of escaping air. A whistle offers essentially one: a single tone whose pitch and loudness rise, fall, hold and break. Speakers map their language onto that one line. Vowels become levels of pitch; consonants become the manner in which the pitch slides from one level to the next, or the way the tone is briefly cut off altogether. A great deal is necessarily lost in the transfer, and the whistled version of a sentence is thinner and more ambiguous than the spoken one. Whistlers compensate by staying close to expected subjects, by repeating what matters, and by leaving the listener to reconstruct the missing detail from context.

CThe practice is not an ornament; it grew out of a practical problem of terrain. The communities that developed it live in deep valleys, on terraced slopes or on ravine-cut hillsides where two houses may be a few hundred metres apart as the crow flies and an hour apart on foot. A shout in such country is smothered by wind and vegetation within a short distance. A whistle behaves differently: its power is concentrated in a narrow band of frequencies to which the ear is unusually sensitive, and which sits above much of the low rumble of the wind. Across an open valley a whistled sentence can be picked up several kilometres away, many times the range of a shout. Herders used it to keep track of animals, to pass on a warning about weather, or to call somebody down to a house.

DWhistled forms of speech have been recorded in dozens of communities on several continents: on an Atlantic island off the coast of Africa, in a village in the mountains behind the Black Sea coast of Turkey, among groups in Mexico, in parts of West Africa, in Southeast Asia and in the Amazon basin. The spoken languages involved are unrelated to one another, and the whistled forms were plainly invented independently. What these places have in common is therefore not a language family or a shared history but a shared predicament: neighbours who were within sight of one another and yet out of easy reach.

EThe whistled languages have also proved useful to people studying how language is handled in the brain. Ordinary speech is processed mainly in the left hemisphere, while melody and pitch draw more heavily on the right. Whistled speech is language delivered as melody, so which side takes charge? In one experiment, fluent whistlers from a Turkish village were played a different syllable into each ear at the same moment, first in speech and then in whistles, and were asked to report what they had heard. With spoken syllables they showed the usual bias towards the left hemisphere. With whistled syllables the two halves of the brain were engaged far more evenly. The finding suggests that the machinery which handles language is less firmly attached to a particular acoustic form than had been assumed.

FAway from the laboratory, meanwhile, the whistling was falling silent. From the middle of the twentieth century roads reached the upper villages, then telephones arrived, and finally a mobile signal covered the valleys; the everyday job the whistle had done was quietly taken over. At the same time young people were leaving for coastal towns and cities, so there were fewer of them on the hillsides to learn it in the ordinary way, by hearing it used. Attitudes mattered as much as technology. Whistling came to be associated with a rural past that many families were trying to put behind them, and some parents saw no reason to pass on a skill that seemed to mark their children as country people. By the end of the century the fluent whistlers in several communities were mostly elderly, and the habit had dropped out of daily use within a single generation.

GThe best-known attempt to reverse this has been made on the Atlantic island. From the late 1990s, lessons in the whistled language became a required part of the primary school timetable; thousands of children have since acquired at least some command of it, and in 2009 the whistled language was added to an international list of cultural heritage. Yet researchers who study these languages are cautious about what such measures achieve. What a classroom transmits, they point out, tends to be a stock of phrases performed for an audience rather than a working means of communication, and a whistled language that survives mainly as a display for visitors has already stopped being speech. Others reply that the lessons at least keep a body of skill in existence. Both sides agree on the underlying test: the future of these languages will be settled less by hours in a classroom than by whether anybody still has a reason to whistle across a valley.