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The night has not yet fallen in La Gomera, one of the smallest Canary Islands.
From the top of the hill I can see, scattered in the distance, a few old houses. To my right, a row of black trees is a stark reminder of the fires that struck this Spanish island off the coast of Morocco last summer.
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There are no certainties about its origins. It is known that when the first European settlers arrived at La Gomera in the 15th Century, the inhabitants of the island - of North African origin - communicated with whistles.
These whistles reproduced the indigenous language. With the arrival of the Spanish, the locals adapted the whistling language to Spanish.
So the most likely theory is that the whistle came with the settlers from Africa, where there are records of other whistled languages.
Some locals recall its widespread use in the 1940s and 50s.
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It is known, for example, that the Gomera whistle co-exists with other whistling languages in the world - on the Greek island of Evia, in the town of Kuskoy, eastern Turkey, and in a town of the French Pyrenees.
But the whistling language of La Gomera is the only one that has been studied in depth and is used by the largest community of speakers, and probably the only one that is learned in school as a subject.
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Congratulations Lion, you have introduced something that I didn't even know existed. In reading the Wiki article and noting who used whistling language, such as the Yoruba and indigenous Mexicans, it got me to wondering if whistling language was related to the use of "Clicks" in the Khoisan languages.
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I think Niger-Congo from the green Sahara was the original language of the world.The languages of some of the ancient world great civilizations were of the Niger-Congo family like Ancient Egypt, Sumeria, Maa confederation, Igbo, Olmec, Mohenjo Daro-Harrapa, Shang, Mali, Canaan, Celt, Latin, Druid Britain etc.
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