Continent: Asia
Country: Myanmar
Region: Tedim, Myanmar (Burma)
Language Macrofamily: Sino-Tibetan
Contrasts Encoded: Tone, Prosody, Stress, Syllable Count, Word, Phrase
Depth of Encoding: Phonetic/Articulatory, Phonemic/Abridging
Content (Other):
Specialization: Youth
Productivity: Fully productive
Summary:
Tedim—also known as Kamhau—Chin whistled speech is an anatomical whistled speech surrogate system closely related to Sizang Chin whistled speech (Stern 1957). It is bilabially produced and is utilized by young Chin community members as a playful and secret way of communicating in both platonic and romantic contexts especially over long distances across fields, villages, and through surrounding jungles. For example, young people also use whistling to flirt with their sweethearts and ask to meet in secret locations. If one wants to amplify their whistled message, two fingers are inserted into the mouth to further restrict airflow, but this technique also reduces the range of whistled articulation possible as the oral cavity’s movement is restricted by the fingers.
Stern notes that the rising, falling, and level tone contours of whistled Tedim are transposed on a diatonic musical scale, which is a wider range than its verbalized base, each tone corresponding to one syllable. Tedim’s tone sandhi is also transposed onto its whistled speech in which rising tones become high tones and falling tones become low tones when immediately preceding phrasal or utterance final pauses. Moreover, utterance and word “junctures,” or boundaries, are preserved from spoken to whistled Tedim within rhythm. Lastly, Stern observes that a speaker’s intonation can also be expressed in whistled Tedim as a young man, “whistling a message to his sweetheart, may impart affect by a gentle sound production, slower rate of delivery, and increased tonal interval” (Stern 1957:500-501).
Bibliography:
Stern, T. (1957). 5. Drum and Whistle “Languages”: An Analysis of Speech Surrogates. In T. A. Sebeok & J. Umiker-Sebeok, Speech Surrogates: Drum and Whistle Systems. 1976. (pp. 124–148). De Gruyter Mouton. https://www.degruyter.com/view/book/9783110804416/10.1515/9783110804416.124.xml
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