What’s that sound: A language of whistles

It is often said that talking is overrated. It is, in a small town of Kuşköy, tucked away in Turkey’s northeast mountains near the Black Sea. Here lives a community that talks only through whistles.

This distinctive language is known as Kuş dili, or “bird language,” that uses high or low pitched tones to form words and sentences. To an untrained, unfamiliar ear the call for work or lunch may sound like a shrill, piercing or melodious noise, in an otherwise quiet valley.

While spoken words need to be communicated at a close range, whistles can be heard from a distance. This dialect is one of the 42 adopted languages that are found in steep terrains or dense forests across the world, including the Atlas Mountains, in northwestern Africa, the highlands of northern Laos and the Brazilian Amazon, where geographical and topographical features force people to communicate over an extended space.

Houses in Kuskoy are sparsely located across the mountainous range. Mehmet Ozturk, the languages editor of Turkey’s state-run news agency, the Anadolu Agency, explains that before modern communications made its way to the town, Kuş dili was the only communication tool in a terrain with steep, dangerous inclines, pine forests and snowbound tracks.

“The terrain is so difficult that the nearest neighbour’s house is a couple of hundred meters up or down the hill or on the other side of the ravine,” says Ozturk.

According to linguists, who have studied the region, the people of Kuşköy speak in Turkish when near each other, but switch to using their tongue, check and fingers when talking from afar.

Also, the bird language is not bothered by long, complicated sentences. Communication is often about short commands. For instance, the phrase "Istanbul is beautiful" is seven separate whistles.

But with the advent of the Internet and cellular phone services, the need for the language has been reduced, making it largely irrelevant. Even though Kuşköy regularly organises a whistling contest to revive the language and to encourage tourism, yet, it seems the archaic dialect is on its way out.