Pitch perfect

For centuries, shepherds from the village of Aas in the French Pyrenees led their animals to mountain pastures for the summer. To ease the solitude, they would communicate with each other or with the village below in a whistled form of the Gascon dialect, transmitting and receiving information accurately over distances of up to 10km

They “spoke” in simple phrases – “What’s the time?”, “Come and eat” – but each word and syllable was articulated as in speech. Outsiders often mistook the whistling for simple signalling, and the irony, says linguist and bioacoustician Julien Meyer of Grenoble Alpes University in France, is that academia only realised its oversight around the middle of the 20th century, just as the whistled language of Aas was dying.

Around 80 whistled languages