When people go to learn a new language, they think that if they learn some things of things, that’s what you’re supposed to do, and it is, but it’s only the beginning. There’s the new grammar -- the sentence organization -- the little signals about gender, number, when it happened, and so on. But considerations that often get missed are the the “song” of the language and the way one holds one’s mouth. I was once taking French and my little dog loved it, because to her it looked like kissing and baby talk. I’d coo “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” and she’d be doing somersaults, even though she didn’t know it was a euphemism.
There are a great many consonants and some vowels that have no alphabet symbol for them. Over the centuries English has dropped out many of the sounds produced in the back of the mouth that might be called “guttural” but Blackfeet kept them. Do not tell Blackfeet their language is guttural, because they are likely to think you are saying they talk gutter language. The Scots still use glottal stops, which you can pick up on some BBC shows if the characters are old-fashioned or just local.
All indigenous tribes are now making an effort to sustain or even recover their original languages, because they have realized that they represent a different world view, one that might encode philosophies and knowledge that are vital. They note that they were forced to speak English, as were all the immigrants coming from Europe. All were punished. In those days education was harsh.
The Yoruba speak a language described as tonal Niger-Congo, which depends upon hearing and pronouncing words one of four ways: rising tone, falling tone, going up and back down or going down and back up. If you pronounce a word but get the tone wrong, you may sound to them as though you said something ridiculous, like telling a waiter you want his mother well-roasted with a special sauce. Chinese is also tonal.
A man whistling information across to the next ridge.
In the Canary Islands and some other places where it is necessary to communicate over very rough land where one might have call from one peak to another, a language has developed that might have emerged from the Yoruba tonal speaking. It is whistling! Yodeling is something like this, but the Canary people are quite serious about teaching it as a language and say it is words. They do not say they learned it from Canary birds, but one could be forgiven for thinking that. These two videos show people actually using the language.
There are various ways to produce the whistling. “Pucker whistling” is what Lauren Bacall described facetiously in her come-hither way. Kids learn this and I find myself whistling with tunes on the radio sometimes. You see in these videos that the Islanders generally put a finger or at least a knuckle in their mouths. One lady has curled her tongue to whistle.
I hadn’t known about whistling languages, but I heard about the “click” consonants. Consonants are always produced by stopping the air flow momentarily in various ways. Musicians can easily produce some of these sounds but we don’t have letters in our alphabet for them. Someone has to make the noise for you, which is great now that computers will “speak.” Kids are good at figuring out how to make sounds, including armpit farts. There's the hard-to-spell sound for a gun firing, something like "kschoor ". We "click" to make a horse start going.
Here’s a list of how to “click”. but limited to the mouth air flow. Symbols for the sounds are suggested.
Xhosa people are "click" users
Clicks are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of southern Africa, and in three languages of East Africa. Examples of these sounds familiar to English speakers are the tsk! tsk! (American spelling) or tut-tut (British spelling) used to express disapproval or pity, the tchick! used to spur on a horse, and the clip-clop! sound children make with their tongue to imitate a horse trotting.
Technically, clicks are obstruents articulated with two closures (points of contact) in the mouth, one forward and one at the back. The enclosed pocket of air is rarefied by a sucking action of the tongue (in technical terminology, clicks have a lingual ingressive airstream mechanism). The forward closure is then released, producing what may be the loudest consonants in the language.
The easiest clicks for English speakers are the dental clicks written with a single pipe, ǀ. They are all sharp (high-pitched) squeaky sounds made by sucking on the front teeth. A simple dental click is used in English to express pity or to shame someone, and sometimes to call an animal.
Tchick, tchick, tchick !!
Then there are the labial clicks, written with a bull's eye, ʘ. These are lip-smacking sounds, but without the pursing of the lips found in a kiss.
The above clicks sound like affricates, in that they involve a lot of friction. The other two families are more abrupt sounds that do not have this friction.
With the alveolar clicks, written with an exclamation mark, ǃ, the tip of the tongue is pulled down abruptly and forcefully from the roof of the mouth, sometimes using a lot of jaw motion, and making a hollow pop! like a cork being pulled from an empty bottle. These sounds can be quite loud.
Finally, the palatal clicks, ǂ, are made with a flat tongue, and are sharper popping sounds than the ǃ clicks, like sharply snapped fingers.
Darrell Kipp at Cuts Wood School with one of his best students.
On YouTube there are many vids about the Blackfeet language. Many will be one-word definitions but the longer examples are better at capturing the “music” of the words. Older people and people from Canada will be more traditional. The word "Blackfeet" is a problem already because Siksika, which is what the people called themselves, had no indicators for plural or singular so on the US side people are accustomed to the plural but on the Canada side they use the singular. If you’re googling, try both. Of course, in English no one makes the plural in the usual way, no one speaks of having “foots.”
Here’s a good example of a Blackfeet language lesson.
(Maybe I should confess that I have a BS in speech education.)
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