Acoustic and Linguistic Properties of Turkish Whistle Language

Abstract

This paper presents the acoustic and linguistic properties of Turkish Whistle Language. Whistle Language is a natural communication method usually used for far-distance interaction in some regions in the world. In a whistled speech, auditory features of spoken languages are transposed. Therefore, whistle languages carry some properties of vocal speech with its own vocabulary, grammar, phonology and prosodic features. There are a few places in the world using this whistled communication style and Kuskoy region in Turkey is one of them. Although there are some researches on Turkish Whistle Language, unfortunately there have been a limited number of scientific publications in the literature. On the other hand, the research results present very stunning results such as people can still continue articulating some words while whistling and there is a high understandability rate while communicating. Therefore, it is described as an incomplete form of Turkish Language. The research results also indicate that Turkish Whistle Language is a non-tonal language transposing formants and therefore it can be used to evaluate the formant changes in the transform of a language. These research results indicate many other valuable properties of Turkish whistle language. But, unfortunately there has not been a collective study combining all these properties. Besides, there are still unclear and conflicted points in the literature as can be implied in this paper. This study aims to bring together the research results to underline the distinct features of Turkish Whistle Language and to motivate researchers to go forward on this subject. The paper is mainly focused on acoustic and phonetic properties of Turkish Whistle Language. Historical or cultural based details are out of the scope of this study.