“We Drummed It into Them so They Can Go Whistle for It!”—Non-vocal Forms of Communication in Oto-Manguean Languages, Pirahã and Bora

This paper tries to approach the vocal and the instrumental from a linguistic perspective. It does so by means of focusing on two linguistic phenomena: whistled and drummed languages. These communicative systems are found in a number of speech communities all over the world, are always based on a given spoken language and are mostly used for long-distance communication. Based on the tentative definition of the vocal as involving vocal cord vibration, we classify both drummed and whistled languages as non-vocal. We then first provide a general overview of the phenomena of whistled and drummed languages. After that we focus on the individual languages chosen for this paper and their respective whistled/drummed versions. The languages chosen are the following: Bora, spoken in Colombia and Peru, Pirahã, spoken in Brazil, and the two Oto-Manguean languages of Chinantec and Mazatec, both spoken in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. As for the question of how the vocal and the instrumental relate to whistled and drummed languages, we arrive at the following conclusion: Since they are always based on spoken language, whistled and drummed languages exhibit an intimate relationship to the vocal. This is despite being classified as non-vocal according to the definition of the vocal employed in this paper.