Which Canary Island has a whistled language that UNESCO protects?
Silbo Gomero can carry across deep valleys.
Silbo Gomero is a whistled form of Spanish used on La Gomera. UNESCO's description says two distinct whistles stand in for the five Spanish vowels and four for the consonants, differing in pitch and in whether the sound is continuous or interrupted. In effect, the whistler transmits the sounds of ordinary speech in a different medium, rather than using a separate code.
The system developed to cross the island's steep ravines, where a loud whistle carries much farther than a shout; it can be heard over distances often described as several kilometres. UNESCO inscribed it on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. It has been taught in schools on La Gomera since 1999, an effort to pass it on after the number of whistlers had fallen as roads and telephones became common.
UNESCO describes it as the only whistled language in the world that is fully developed and practised by a large community, though other whistled speech systems exist elsewhere, such as in Turkey, Greece and Mexico. Whistled languages of the Canary Islands once existed on other islands and have mostly vanished. Silbo is not a distinct language with its own grammar; it is a whistled register of Spanish, and in the past scholars have linked its origins to the Indigenous Guanche inhabitants, although the details are debated.