Whistled speech has been introduced at the end of the 90s in primary school in La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands (Trujillo et al 2005) and has been included in 2007 in the new official program of secondary school for the Mazatec area of the Oaxaca region in Mexico (Casimiro et al 2007). Both of these initiatives are the result of a lobbying process of the local populations
to have this symbolic part of their language revitalized thanks to an introduction in official educative systems. The didactic applications of whistled Mazatec and the Gomero Spanish are different because of specific
historical and educational contexts but also of phonetic differences between the strategies of emulation into whistles of tonal Mazatec and non tonal Spanish. After a phonetic description of whistled speech in these two
languages, we present how these results have been exploited to pedagogic applications in Canary islands and in Mexico. |
