Llengua xiulada d'Aas

The whistling language of Aas (in Gascon Occitan, shiulat language of Aas) is a whistled version of Mountain Béarnès, variant of Gascon, a system of own communication of the town of Aas in the municipality of Aigas Bonas (Atlantic Pyrenees). It is an extinct language. From 1930 it lost vitality with the industrialization of the region and the rural exodus. The last whistleblower died in 1999.

The topography and isolation of the Aussau and Aspa valleys favor their development; the valleys act as wave propagators of whistled signals. The shepherds went up in the summer to the mountain pastures and kept in touch with each other with whistles, as well as passing on the news of the town. Curiously, no other town in the region used whistles and they were even unaware of their existence until they began to study it in the 1960s.

The whistled signals follow a syntactic system analogous to the spoken language of Bearnaise. The whistling language of Aas is characterized by the intonation of stressed vowels. Unaccented vowels are whistled at different frequencies, in descending order: i, e, a, u, o. The e is often realized as an i. Conversely, accented vowels stand out for the high amplitude, an increase in frequency and for a longer duration than the equivalent unaccented vowel. Consonants are whistled like the Gomeren whistle with a modulation that depends on the vowel of the syllable.