Continent: North America
Country: Mexico
Region: Sierra Puebla, Mexico
Language Macrofamily: Totonacan
Contrasts Encoded: Consonants, Tone, Stress, Syllable Structure, Vowel Length, Other
Depth of Encoding: Phonemic/Abridging
Content (Other):
Specialization: No exact information about the situation of the Tepehua community, although only men whistle in communities with whistled Mazatec (women may understand what is being whistled but do not whistle themselves).
Productivity: High
Summary:
Whistled Tepehua, which uses the Mexican language Tepehua, as its base language, is articulated with protruding lips and is “accompanied by movements of the tongue and lips, and with either egressive or ingressive lung air” (Cowan 695).
The surrogate is capable of encoding intonation patterns, stress, vowel length and rounding, as well as the phonetic qualities of consonants. While all consonants are voiceless in whistled Tepehua, the phonemic contrasts are well preserved. For example, fricatives and affricates can be heard with their signature friction while stops are accompanied by a complete closure (695). The vowels in whistled Tepehua are omitted when in utterance-final position. When such vowels are preceded by obstruents, the obstruents are aspirated in the whistle. There has also been evidence that the lip rounding and positioning when the vowel is articulated in spoken speech is emulated when whistling the same vowel (696). Whistled Tepehua is also capable of encoding pitch contours, similar to how “pitch features” (696) of normal speech help to identify and distinguish between consonants and vowels.
Cowan states that whistled Tepehua may be used to convey “what [one] might otherwise say” (697), further explaining that the whistling can be perceived as a “level or a style of the usual spoken form” (697), comparable to whistling.
Bibliography:
Cowan, G. (1972). Segmental features of whistled Tepehua. Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Montreal, 695-98.
Cowan, G. (1976). Whistled Tepehua. In T. Sebeok, D.J. Umiker-Sebeok (Eds.). Speech surrogates: drum and whistle systems (pp. 1400-1409). Paris and La Haye: Mouton.
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