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Mazatec

Mazatec of Mexico

Whistle Talk: Speech Without Consonants or Vowels

The fact that sustained conversations are often carried on by whistling, using only the tone components of words, shows how important tones are in this language.

Mazatecs helped SIL linguists Eunice Pike and George and Florence Cowan analyze and learn the tones of their language by whistling words for them.

Below is a typical whistled conversation. The words which the tones are conveying have been written in:



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