00:00Your boat anchors on one of the smallest islands in the Canaries, off the northwest coast of Africa.
00:06Finally, a little calm and tranquility.
00:08This place is not as touristic as other islands you have visited.
00:12Among the main curiosities,
00:14we find a house where Christophe Colomb stayed during his first transatlantic trip,
00:19as well as many hills.
00:21You hear the sound of waves and birds,
00:23but what is this distant whistle?
00:25It is soon followed by another whistle of a different tonality.
00:29Your guide explains to you that it is not teenagers having fun,
00:33but people trying to preserve one of the strangest languages in the world.
00:37It is the Silbo Gomero,
00:39which is spoken only on the island of Gomera.
00:42And no, the inhabitants are not all opera singers or musicians.
00:46This magnificent mode of communication is born out of necessity.
00:50As you can see, the terrain of the island of Gomera
00:53is essentially made up of hills and deep ravines.
00:56Imagine that you have an important message to convey
00:59to someone who lives on the other side of the ravine.
01:01You have to go up, go down, go up and down.
01:04I'm a little tired.
01:06Screaming entire sentences in a normal language will not take you far,
01:09unless you have special equipment.
01:11In addition, it would be quite disturbing.
01:14So why not try to whistle your message and,
01:17thus, make it fly several kilometers in flight of birds?
01:21This is probably what the inhabitants of the region said
01:24when they decided to use a piercing sound carried by the wind
01:27to take part in important events, to do business,
01:30and to be aware of the approach of a danger.
01:33This language has existed for several centuries,
01:35but no one knows exactly who invented it or when.
01:38We only know that the first European settlers
01:41set foot on this land in the 15th century
01:43and that the Silbo Gomero already existed at the time.
01:46The local population of North Africa
01:48used whistles to communicate.
01:51And it was not a simple musical charade.
01:54The whistlers reproduced their language composed of words.
01:57The Spaniards then adapted this whistling language to theirs.
02:00Thus, the Silbo Gomero that you can learn today
02:03uses six types of sounds.
02:05Two of the whistles represent the five vowels of the Spanish language
02:09and the others replace the 22 consonants.
02:12All the whistlers have to do
02:14is lengthen or shorten the sounds to imitate the real words.
02:17And the language now has more than 4,000 words.
02:20The speakers, or rather the whistlers, the most competent,
02:23use different methods to produce sounds
02:26and know how to recognize people by their accent.
02:28But to be more clear,
02:30most whistlers start by introducing themselves
02:32and by naming the recipient of their message.
02:35When the recipient understands the message,
02:37he responds with a whistle that means
02:39Bueno Bueno.
02:40In the 1950s,
02:42the Silbo Gomero was so popular on the island
02:44that the whistlers had to line up
02:46to deliver their message.
02:48It was mainly farmers
02:50who needed to exchange instructions
02:52with other people.
02:54Over the following decades,
02:56most agricultural lands were abandoned
02:58and many workers left,
03:00so that the practice of whistling
03:02became a little rarer.
03:04In the 1990s,
03:06with the development of new means of communication
03:08and the construction of new roads on the island,
03:10local authorities were worried
03:12about the future of this unique language.
03:14They added it to the primary school curriculum.
03:17In 2009, UNESCO officially recognized
03:19this language as a cultural heritage.
03:21If you are good at whistling,
03:23you can tell your friends
03:25that you have learned a new language
03:27during your trip,
03:29hoping that there are no real Silbo Gomero speakers
03:31in the area.
03:33You do not want to whistle?
03:35In this case, you may appreciate the language of the Piraeus,
03:37which is hidden at the bottom of the Amazon forest,
03:39in Brazil.
03:41These men literally live in the present.
03:43They do not create myths,
03:45because what they see here and now is real.
03:47This is why they do not invent
03:49complicated sentences with different tenses.
03:51They only describe what they know
03:53and what they see.
03:55The good news is that there are only 8 consonants
03:57and 3 vowels.
03:59The bad news is that the language
04:01is based on tones and accents.
04:03There are no words for numbers,
04:05there is a small quantity
04:07and a larger quantity.
04:09Words, all, each, everyone,
04:11most or few, do not exist either.
04:13And if you start in this language,
04:15do not expect a lesson on colors.
04:17There are simply no words
04:19to designate them.
04:21A red cup is not red,
04:23it is the color of a bay that all the members of the tribe know.
04:25The Piraeus are not the kind to whistle.
04:27So there is no room
04:29for whispers in their language.
04:31Instead of saying thank you,
04:33they offer gifts or do something nice.
04:35They also use suffixes
04:37that replace entire sentences.
04:39For example, instead of saying
04:41I know that my neighbor picked up the flower
04:43because I saw him do it,
04:45they only use a suffix that means
04:47that they are certain of something
04:49because they saw it with their own eyes.
04:51They like to ask direct questions such as
04:53Where is the cabin?
04:55And answer without additional words
04:57On the edge of the river.
04:59Does it seem too complicated to you?
05:01What would you say about a language that has
05:03the smallest alphabet of all time
05:05with only 12 letters and 11 sounds?
05:07The 4,300 people around
05:09of an island located east of Papua New Guinea
05:11speak the Rotokas.
05:13Equipped with a rather limited alphabet,
05:15the Rotokas also has
05:17a fairly regular syntax structure.
05:19Adjectives and pronouns come before the names
05:21they modify.
05:23In South Africa, 7 million people
05:25communicate in Angsosa.
05:27It is a language based on three types of clicks
05:29and the only way to feel the difference
05:31between words is to use a tone system.
05:33If you want to master this language,
05:35plan to stay here for a while.
05:37We cannot say that the Aymara
05:39is a rare language,
05:41given that it has about 2 million speakers
05:43and that it is one of the official languages
05:45of Bolivia and Peru.
05:47But it certainly deserves to be
05:49qualified as a super original language
05:51because of its time system.
05:53The future is perceived as something
05:55that is behind you and not in front of you
05:57as we are used to.
05:59As it is something we do not know anything about
06:01and that we cannot see,
06:03the future is behind us.
06:05I know, I do not understand anything either.
06:07Anyway, another interesting thing
06:09is that the names have no gender.
06:11And we have to thank the Aymara
06:13for the word alpaga, yes.
06:15Tuyuka is much less widespread,
06:17with only a thousand speakers
06:19living in Brazil and Colombia.
06:21This language has more than a hundred
06:23genders for words.
06:25It is also one of those languages where morphemes stack
06:27to form super long words
06:29that replace entire sentences.
06:31Here is what the sentence
06:33in Tuyuka means.
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