| الوصف: |
This chapter describes the most common contexts of the use of whistled speech along with the dynamics that explain the strong decline of this practice. We show that the special association of whistled speech with certain traditional outdoor activities makes it very sensitive to behavioral changes due to the modernization of the countryside to the point that we diagnose the phenomenon as universally endangered. Here, we compare the impacts of political and social changes on whistled speech to those generally found by linguists on spoken language in the frame of language ecology, which is a domain of research that addresses the dynamics of interactions between languages and their sociopolitical contexts. At the individual level, we identified the same categories of whistlers’ competences worldwide, which are quite similar to the profiles of speaker of languages that are undergoing a strong vitality loss, as documented in the work of Dorian (Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Dialect. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1981) and Grinevald (Language Documentation and description. ELDP SOAS, London, pp. 52–72, 2003). To illustrate the general tendencies of attrition at the population level, we describe case studies where whistled speech has died (Aas in France), is close to death (Antia in Greece) or is under serious threat (the Gaviao population in Brazil). Finally, we explore the different initiatives that have been developed to safeguard or maintain this language register, namely, documentation, archiving, revitalization and even revival. |
