SAN SEBASTIAN DE LA GOMERA – (dpa) – Behaviour that would earn black looks from most teachers is on the timetable of a school on the island of La Gomera in the Canaries – whistling.
The pupils aged between 6 and 12 must whistle loudly at least once a week before moving on to their lessons in mathematics, history or geography.The children are learning “El Silbo”, the whistling language used by the original inhabitants of the rugged little island in the Atlantic Ocean to communicate with each other long before the Spanish invaders came in the 15th century.The sibilista tradition is still practised today although by a few shepherds and farmers in remote parts of the island, with its scattered farmsteads and hamlets.The local government in San Sebastian is keen to promote El Silbo which it sees as being endangered in an age of mobile telephones and the Internet so it introduced compulsory public school instruction in the skill this year.So far “459 girls and boys have learned how to whistle and that’s a third of all pupils on the island,” said project leader Ramon Correa proudly.Not that the principle of El Silbo is hard to grasp. A whistler puts forefinger and middle finger in his mouth and modulates the tones using his tongue. He or she uses the other hand for amplification.“The difficult bit is working out what the whistles mean,” said the 36-year-old philologist. “El Silbo” has many nuances, with each tone corresponding to a different letter in the alphabet or syllable depending on the pitch and volume used.Children are taught first to whistle their name properly although it can be misleading if two pupils in the same class are called Juan. To avoid confusion, one of the two has to learn the whistled version of the surname.“You can actually express everything using El Silbo, you just need a trained ear,” said Correa. The children seem to like it anyway. In a survey 87 per cent of those taught said they enjoyed the lessons.To get the project off to a flying start the school board hired two professionals, Lino Rodriguez, 57 and Isidro Ortiz, 68. The two shepherds grew up with the whistling language and devote their attention to both teaching and tending flocks.“When I was a child and we lived in the mountains we didn’t have either electricity or telephone,” recalled Rodriguez. “My father used to whistle to me depending on whether he wanted a pickaxe a spade or a pail of water bringing up.”El Silbo phrases were used to spread news of births and deaths in the community, said Rodriguez before allowing himself a little chuckle.It seems the regular teachers at Gomera’s schools have a hard time keeping ahead of their pupils in whistling lessons, said the father of nine children. “Some of them think that just because they’ve been to university they know everything. But they prefer to let me get on with the whistling.”The origins of the whistling language are unclear. It possibly originated among the indigenous Berber peoples of the Atlas Mountains in what is now Morocco.It’s certain though that French missionaries related as early as 1413 in a manuscript entitled “Le Canarien” of a strange tribe in the islands whose members spoke only by whistling.In those days El Silbo was in everyday use on Teneriffa and El Hierro albeit in the tongue of the island’s first inhabitants. Only after the conquest of the Canaries, did the islanders start whistling in “Spanish”.For many years historians believed El Silbo originated because the Spanish Conquistadors cut out the tongues of restive natives as a punishment.The theory has since been disproved. Whistling was simply a practical way of communicating between tribes on an island with many steep slopes and isolated valleys. A good whistler has a range of up to six kilometres and some of Gomera’s shepherds are still among the best.
