The Defunct Béarnais Whistles of France

The Pyrenees mountains between metropoles Barcelona and Bordeaux, Toulouse and Bilbao, are quite modern, juggling tourists, pilgrims, winter athletes, and the principality of Andorra between its peaks. However, the spotlight over this region has exposed in the foothills and the valley of Ossau, on the French side, a tradition quite different than those aforementioned. Unlike the comic strip Astérix where a Breton village resists the onslaught of the Roman Empire with a magical potion, the commune of Aas has not prevented its own magical asset, a  whistled language permitting long-range communication, from being rendered obsolete. Aas, which was originally only shepherds whistling a transcription of the local patois, Béarnais, has seen its youth leave and the others become town employees.

Busnel is on the case again. A prolific French phonologist, notably interested in the whistled languages of the Canaries and Turkey, received a letter informing him of an occurrence in his own backyard, or at least his vacation-spot. He was able to conduct, with a team of scientists and a few of the last speakers, studies on the Pyrenean phenomenon which had flourished up till the 1920s.  This was when hydraulics brought electricity and technology to an otherwise quite mountainous and rural region. The terrain at about 800 meters altitude explains the formation of the whistled Béarnais, which can travel great distances without reduced intelligibility. Busnel’s laboratory measured the amplitude to be on average 120 decibels, just above the highest a spoken language can reach. The whistles are also developed at higher frequencies, 2 kilohertz instead of .500 kilohertz, but within a narrower range and with fewer formants and variations in the intensity. The team of scientists also conducted x-rays of the voice box in Béarnais whistlers. These revealed a piston effect of the air cavities and a rise of the larynx without notable vibration of the vocal cords.

While the semantics and didactics are seemingly complicated, the local speakers insist, in the documentary made of them, that they are simply reproducing the spoken sounds in whistled form, which in phonology is described as an analogous syntactic system. Obviously some sounds are difficult to distinguish like the consonants [b] and [p] for example, inhibiting, somewhat, the use of complex sentence structure. In fact, Busnel faced refusal when he asked that the subjects whistle “le soleil n’indique jamais la place des amoureux” (the sun never indicates the place of lovers), a phrase which ultimately has nothing to do with shepherds. Busnel found easier phrases such as “Quel heure est-il?” (What time is it?) as he continued his ethological study.

It is Julien Meyer, a well-known expert on whistled languages, that describes Busnel’s ethological passion for which he used the most innovative technology at the time. Meyer, seeking to undertake a follow-up on Béarnais, was confronted with not even one speaker being found in 2003. Thus this whistled variety can be considered extinct, probably since 1999. Nearby villages will not know the difference since they were ignorant of the whistled language’s existence until recently but phonologists and linguists will certainly mourn the loss.  This being, Béarnais greatly resembles Silbo Gomero of the Canary islands because the Béarnais patois has many elements of Spanish. And since Silbo Gomero lives on, whistled Romance languages do as well. For those interested in learning more about Béarnais the majority of published information is in French due to the mother tongues of Busnel and Meyer, and the location of Aas. The vestige however belongs to the entire world and this incidence in France reminds us that wherever there are foothills… a whistled language likely developed, whether still in use or not.

For an overview of our translation expertise, visit our medical and life science translation service page.

Tags: french, languages, silbo, whistle

Category: Foreign Language