Even by the stan­dards of south­east Asia, Laos is a lin­guis­ti­cal­ly inter­est­ing place. As a for­mer French colony, it remains part of la Fran­coph­o­nie, yet iron­i­cal­ly, French is not its lin­gua fran­ca; that would be Lao, spo­ken native­ly by just over half the pop­u­la­tion (as well, in anoth­er dialect, by many more Thais on the oth­er side of the west­ern bor­der). And that does­n’t even get into the 90 oth­er tongues spo­ken in the var­i­ous regions of Laos, many of which sound noth­ing like the major lan­guages in use. Ven­ture far from Vien­tiane, up into the coun­try’s north­ern high­lands, and you’ll even hear a lan­guage com­posed entire­ly of whis­tles.

You’ll hear it if you’re lucky, any­way. As con­veyed in Omi Zola Gup­ta and Sparsh Ahu­ja’s short doc­u­men­tary Bird­song, this lan­guage has pre­cious few remain­ing native speak­ers — or, in the case of one arti­san who com­mu­ni­cates through a kind of tra­di­tion­al bam­boo bag­pipe called the qeej, play­ers. They hail from Long Lan, a vil­lage inhab­it­ed by the Hmong peo­ple (who in the Unit­ed States became known as an immi­grant group thanks to Clint East­wood’s film Gran Tori­no).

“Hmong peo­ple are roman­tics because we live in the moun­tains, sur­round­ed by the sounds of the birds and the rodents, the winds and mead­ows of flow­ers,” says one of them. “The insects and birds are still singing in the for­est,” adds anoth­er, “but we don’t hear them in the city any­more. And with­out the birds, how can we tell the sea­sons?”

Like oth­er whis­tled lan­guages (includ­ing the Oax­a­can, Turk­ish, and Canari­an ones we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), that used by the vil­lagers of Long Lan does not belong to the urban world. As Lau­ra Spin­ney writes in the Guardian, some 80 such lan­guages still exist in total, “on every inhab­it­ed con­ti­nent, usu­al­ly where tra­di­tion­al rur­al lifestyles per­sist, and in places where the ter­rain makes long-dis­tance com­mu­ni­ca­tion both dif­fi­cult and nec­es­sary — high moun­tains, for exam­ple, or dense for­est.” Though all of them are now endan­gered, “whis­tled lan­guages have come into their own in sur­pris­ing ways in the past. They have often flour­ished when there has been a need for secre­cy,” as when Papua New Guineans used theirs to evade Japan­ese sur­veil­lance in World War II — or, as one of Bird­song’s inter­vie­wees remem­bers, when he had things to say meant for his girl­friend’s ears alone.

via Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

Speak­ing in Whis­tles: The Whis­tled Lan­guage of Oax­a­ca, Mex­i­co

Dis­cov­er the Dis­ap­pear­ing Turk­ish Lan­guage That is Whis­tled, Not Spo­ken

The Fas­ci­nat­ing Whis­tled Lan­guages of the Canary Islands, Turkey & Mex­i­co (and What They Say About the Human Brain)

How Lan­guages Evolve: Explained in a Win­ning TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion

The Rarest Sounds Across All Human Lan­guages: Learn What They Are, and How to Say Them

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The dis­tinc­tive­ness of the accent heard in a place reflects that place’s iso­la­tion. It’s prob­a­bly no coin­ci­dence that, as almost every place in the world has become less iso­lat­ed, accents have become less dis­tinc­tive. In these days of van­ish­ing forms of region­al speech, if you want­ed to hear a new one com­ing into being, you’d have to go to the ends of the Earth — or one spe­cif­ic end of the Earth, any­way, as demon­strat­ed not long ago by researchers from the Lud­wig Max­i­m­il­ian Uni­ver­si­ty of Munich. Tak­ing and ana­lyz­ing record­ings made over the course of one win­ter, they dis­cov­ered that a new accent has begun to take shape in Eng­lish as spo­ken in Antarc­ti­ca.

“Antarc­ti­ca has no native pop­u­la­tion or per­ma­nent res­i­dents, but it does have a tran­si­to­ry com­mu­ni­ty of sci­en­tists and sup­port staff who live there for part of the year on a rota­tion­al basis,” writes Tom Hale at IFL Sci­ence. “In the sum­mer months, there are typ­i­cal­ly around 5,000 peo­ple liv­ing in Antarc­ti­ca, but that drops to just 1,000 in the win­ter.” It was from this group of the Antarc­tic “over-win­ter­ers” — and in par­tic­u­lar, from those work­ing on the British Antarc­tic Sur­vey — that the lin­guis­tic researchers recruit­ed their sub­jects, eight of whom were from Eng­land, one from the Unit­ed States, one from Ger­many, and one from Ice­land.

“The find­ings revealed sub­tle but mea­sur­able changes in the speech of the over­win­ter­ing staff dur­ing their time in Antarc­ti­ca,” writes Men­tal Floss’ Brett Reynolds. “One change was con­ver­gence, where indi­vid­u­als in a close-knit group uncon­scious­ly begin to adopt sim­i­lar speech char­ac­ter­is­tics. In this case, that meant con­ver­gence of /u/ (the ‘oo’ in goose), /ju/ (the ‘you’ in few), /ou/ (the ‘oh’ in goat), and /ɪ:/ (the ‘ee’ in the last syl­la­ble in hap­py).” Apart from that phe­nom­e­non, the researchers also noticed anoth­er change in the /ou/ of goat: “the over-win­ter­ers began to pro­nounce it more toward the front of their mouths than toward the back. (British pro­nun­ci­a­tions are already typ­i­cal­ly fron­ter than Amer­i­can /ou/.)”

Even if you got into a con­ver­sa­tion with a sci­en­tist just back from a long win­ter in Antarc­ti­ca, you prob­a­bly would­n’t notice any of this. But the fact that the dif­fer­ences between the series of record­ings tak­en at six-week inter­vals dur­ing the win­ter show mea­sur­able changes in pro­nun­ci­a­tion when com­pared to con­trol record­ings tak­en back in the Unit­ed King­dom sug­gests that the iso­la­tion of Antarc­ti­ca real­ly does encour­age the for­ma­tion of a new accent. Giv­en a suf­fi­cient­ly long time span, an accent nat­u­ral­ly becomes a dialect, and even­tu­al­ly a sep­a­rate lan­guage. Per­haps, even in our age of much-lament­ed loss of lin­guis­tic diver­si­ty, some of us can look for­ward to hav­ing Antarc­tic-speak­ing descen­dants.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Speech Accent Archive: The Eng­lish Accents of Peo­ple Who Speak 341 Dif­fer­ent Lan­guages

Why You Have an Accent When You Speak a For­eign Lan­guage

What Eng­lish Would Sound Like If It Was Pro­nounced Pho­net­i­cal­ly

Meet the Amer­i­cans Who Speak with Eliz­a­bethan Eng­lish Accents: An Intro­duc­tion to the “Hoi Toi­ders” from Ocra­coke, North Car­oli­na

Metal­li­ca Plays Antarc­ti­ca, Set­ting a World Record as the First Band to Play All 7 Con­ti­nents: Watch the Full Con­cert Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

When we start learn­ing a lan­guage, we soon find our­selves prac­tic­ing how to ask for the time. This can feel like a point­less exer­cise today, when each glance at our phone tells us the hour and minute with pre­ci­sion, but it can be jus­ti­fied as a prac­ti­cal way of get­ting the lan­guage’s num­bers down in a famil­iar con­text. Yet not every cul­ture’s way of time-telling is equal­ly famil­iar: in Tan­za­nia, for exam­ple, so near the equa­tor that “the sun ris­es around the same time every morn­ing, six in the local time zone,” and “every­one’s up and start­ing their day at sev­en. With such a reli­able stan­dard time-keep­er, that winds up being 1:00 Swahili time.”

“Swahili time” is just one of the con­cepts intro­duced by Youtu­ber Joshua Rud­der, cre­ator of the chan­nel Nativlang, in the video above.

He also touch­es on the medieval six-hour clocks of Italy; the Thai time-tellers who “count the hours from one to six, four times a day”; the ancient Egypt­ian method of let­ting the length of hours them­selves expand and con­tract with the amount of day­light; the Nahua divi­sion of divid­ing the “day­light day” into four parts and the night into sev­en; the bewil­der­ing­ly many Hin­dus­tani units of time, from the aayan, ruthu, and masa to the lava, renu, and tru­ti, by which point you get down to “divi­sions of microsec­onds.”

To a native­ly Eng­lish-speak­ing West­ern­er, few of these sys­tems may feel par­tic­u­lar­ly intu­itive. But most of us, from whichev­er cul­ture we may hail, will see a cer­tain sense in the Japan­ese way of allow­ing late nights to “stretch to twen­ty-five o’clock, twen­ty-nine o’clock, all the way up to thir­ty. Maybe you feel like if you’re up past mid­night, it’s not tomor­row yet, not real­ly, and you haven’t even gone to bed.” Hence this extend­ed clock, whose last six hours “over­lap with what will have been the tech­ni­cal start of your twen­ty-four hour day when you wake up tomor­row” — but, with any luck, don’t over­lap onto any ear­ly-morn­ing lan­guage class­es.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Clocks Changed Human­i­ty For­ev­er, Mak­ing Us Mas­ters and Slaves of Time

Why Time Seems to Speed Up as We Get Old­er: What the Research Says

An Ani­mat­ed Alan Watts Wax­es Philo­soph­i­cal About Time in The Fine Art of Goof­ing Off, the 1970s “Sesame Street for Grown-Ups”

The Rarest Sounds Across All Human Lan­guages: Learn What They Are, and How to Say Them

Was There a First Human Lan­guage?: The­o­ries from the Enlight­en­ment Through Noam Chom­sky

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

One occa­sion­al­ly hears it insist­ed that, out­side cer­tain cul­tur­al­ly dis­tinct regions of the coun­try, Amer­i­cans “don’t have an accent.” This notion is exposed as non­sense the moment one of those Amer­i­cans starts speak­ing a for­eign lan­guage, some­times at the very first word. “Hold the palm of your hand up in front of your mouth and say ‘Paris’ in Eng­lish,” advis­es the host of the Econ­o­mist video above. “You’ll feel a lit­tle puff of air on your hand. Now, try the same thing again, but try to remove that puff of air, and you’ll get some­thing clos­er to the French sound.” While this test works best for Amer­i­cans, native speak­ers of many lan­guages oth­er than French should feel a dif­fer­ence.

No mat­ter where they’re from, “peo­ple find them­selves sub­con­scious­ly adapt­ing words of a for­eign lan­guage to fit the rules of their own,” com­bin­ing, empha­siz­ing, and drop­ping sounds in the man­ner to which they’ve been accus­tomed since ear­ly child­hood: the native Ara­bic speak­er pro­nounces chil­dren as childiren, the Spaniard says he comes from espain, a French­man calls Texas’ biggest city yoo-STON.

It’s one thing to mas­ter a for­eign lan­guage’s library of sounds, but quite anoth­er to nail its “stress pat­terns” that dic­tate which syl­la­bles are empha­sized. That no syl­la­bles are empha­sized in Japan­ese reveals the native stress pat­terns of its for­eign speak­ers: lis­ten to how clear­ly the dis­tinc­tive Amer­i­can Eng­lish rhythm comes through in, say, the name of the famous nov­el­ist ha-RU-ki mu-ra-KA-mi.

Some lan­guages, like Ital­ian and Can­tonese, are “syl­la­ble timed,” which means that “every syl­la­ble has rough­ly the same dura­tion.” This is quite unlike Eng­lish, whose “stressed syl­la­bles come at rough­ly reg­u­lar inter­vals, and the remain­der are less dis­tinct­ly pro­nounced.” Non-native Eng­lish speak­ers who ignore that aspect of the lan­guage will always sound for­eign, no mat­ter their lev­el of flu­en­cy. Of course, hav­ing an accent isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a bad thing, and indeed, we all know indi­vid­u­als who have played it up to great advan­tage in their per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al lives. But as an Amer­i­can liv­ing abroad, I do feel a cer­tain respon­si­bil­i­ty to con­tra­dict our rep­u­ta­tion for blithe inep­ti­tude out­side Eng­lish. Such an effort must begin with tak­ing any lan­guage, what­ev­er its par­tic­u­lar set of tech­ni­cal or cul­tur­al char­ac­ter­is­tics, one sound at a time.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

What Are the Most Effec­tive Strate­gies for Learn­ing a For­eign Lan­guage?: Six TED Talks Pro­vide the Answers

A Tour of U.S. Accents: Boston­ian, Philadelph­ese, Gul­lah Cre­ole & Oth­er Intrigu­ing Dialects

Peter Sell­ers Presents The Com­plete Guide To Accents of The British Isles

The Speech Accent Archive: The Eng­lish Accents of Peo­ple Who Speak 341 Dif­fer­ent Lan­guages

A Map Show­ing How Much Time It Takes to Learn For­eign Lan­guages: From Eas­i­est to Hard­est

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.