It’s often said that French is silky, German is brutish, Italian is sexy, and Mandarin is angry. But do those stereotypes of these diverse languages hold empirically across cultures? Are some ...

Márquez is a proud guardian of La Gomera’s whistling language, which he called “the poetry of my island.” And, he added, “like poetry, whistling does not need to be useful in order to be ...

Antonio Marquéz Navarro, 71, sits atop a cliff in the Canary Islands where he whistled the invitation "Come over here, we're going to slaughter the pig," in La Gomera, Spain, Jan. 24, 2021.

The language, officially known as Silbo Gomero, substitutes whistled sounds that vary by pitch and length for written letters. Unfortunately, there are fewer whistles than there are letters in the ...

News ‘Special and beautiful’ whistled language echoes around La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands Finbarr O'Reilly/The New York Times 1 of 3 ...