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Coding Human Languages for Long-Range Communication in Natural Ecological Environments: Shouting, Whistling, and Drumming

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Coding Strategies in Vertebrate Acoustic Communication

Part of the book series: Animal Signals and Communication ((ANISIGCOM,volume 7))

Abstract

Human languages represent very complex coding systems that can be decoded by the human brain after a long acquisition phase. In their acoustic form, human languages can be expressed through different natural speech types. Modal speech is the most common one but several other registers have evolved around the world to enable interlocutors to speak from far. This chapter first provides a large overview of the limits of modal speech for distance communication and lists the major acoustic constraints that interfere with spoken communications in rural outdoor settings. Next, it describes how speech has been naturally adapted to these constraints in different populations by transforming the sounds of spoken languages in shouted speech, whistled speech, or drummed speech. These three registers represent different ways of coding the same linguistic targets as modal speech. Their comparison in a wide variety of languages of the world highlights the great productive and perceptual flexibility of humans to transmit messages of linguistic attitude for telecommunication purposes in natural surroundings.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An optimal natural quiet is generally found at night, when the power of sounds is low (often approximately 30–35 dB). In dense tropical forests, natural quiet is rare because of the activity of birds, anurans, and insects but it is pervading in the background. In temperate climates its occurrence depends greatly on the season, besides its underlying presence all the year (Fig. 4.1).

  2. 2.

    [∫] is the phonetic symbol used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent a consonantal sound used in many languages, including English and French. In English it is usually spelled “sh,” as in “ship.” It is called a voiceless palato-alveolar fricative.

  3. 3.

    Whistles are among the most powerful acoustic productions that can be produced by the human vocal tract, as they can easily reach 120 dB at 1 m of the emitter with the strongest techniques that imply fingers or retroflexed tongue.

  4. 4.

    Therefore, in the whistled form of a tonal language, the vocal quality is completely excluded. This exclusion occurs even when the functional load of information transported by tones is less than that corresponding to the vocal quality, as if there were a functional or perceptual precedence of lexical tone that guides the emulation of spoken speech.

  5. 5.

    In linguistics, a syllable is considered “closed” if the nucleus of the syllable (the vowel most of the time) is followed by a consonant which pertains to this same syllable. The syllable is considered “open” if the nucleus is not closed by a consonant.

  6. 6.

    The notion of linguistic “weight” generally correlates with duration. It may be applied to syllables but also to V-to-V intervals. In any case, a “heavy” unit is composed of long vowels and/or is ending with consonant(s) (Lunden 2017).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble, France

    Julien Meyer

  2. Research Association ‘The World Whistles’ (Le Monde Siffle), Paris, France

    Julien Meyer

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  1. Julien Meyer
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Correspondence to Julien Meyer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Equipe Communications Acoustiques Neuro-PSI, CNRS UMR9197, University Paris-Saclay, Orsay, France

    Thierry Aubin

  2. Equipe de Neuro-Ethologie Sensorielle, ENES/CRNL, CNRS UMR5292, INSERM UMRS1028, University of Lyon, Saint-Etienne, France

    Nicolas Mathevon

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Meyer, J. (2020). Coding Human Languages for Long-Range Communication in Natural Ecological Environments: Shouting, Whistling, and Drumming. In: Aubin, T., Mathevon, N. (eds) Coding Strategies in Vertebrate Acoustic Communication. Animal Signals and Communication, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39200-0_4

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