#sfyria

Residents of the mountainous village of Antia, on the idyllic island of Evia, Greece “speak” a unique whistling language called “Sfyria.”

The villagers of Antia use different whistled tones corresponding to a letter of the alphabet. By putting each whistled note in order, they form words.

In this way, they can talk and understand each other simply by whistling. Children learn the language at the age of 5 or 6.

Sfyria is a unique, whistled language spoken in Greece. Technically it isn’t a language, but rather a whistled way of speaking Greek. Technically Sfyria is the same language as Modern Standard Greek, but due to it being whistled Greek speakers can’t understand without learning it. The orthography is also the same as Greek. People use Syfria on the island of Evia in the village of Antia. The villagers claim that this language has been spoken here since antiquity, but the language was only officially discovered in 1969 when a plane crashed near the village. The language is primarily used to communicate over long distances, as whistling can travel farther than shouting, but it could also be in vis-a-vis type situations. In recent years the language has been losing speakers. The villagers would like to preserve the language and to teach it to people to help it stay alive.

Articles:

BBC article

The outline article

The outline’s Syfria recordings on SoundCloud

PBS article

Terminology coordination article

Videos:

PBS

Scientific American

Alpha Omega Translations

The whistled language of Greece: The story of Antia

The only whistled language in Greece (and one of the only two in Europe) is still used in Antia, a small village in the south of the island of Evia (Euboea), where the locals call it sfyria (from the Greek sfyrizo "to whistle").

Sfyria has a centuries-long history, and has always been used by the inhabitants of mountain-encircled Antia, especially the shepherds, who are believed to have used the whistled language to communicate with each other and with their families across enormous distances. The high-pitched sound combined with the mountainous terrain helped the sound travel even further.

However, the actual origin of this form of communication remains uncertain; according to one theory, it originates from Persian soldiers who had been guarding Greek prisoners in the Karystos area, and later fled into the highlands following their defeat in the Battle of Salamis in 480BC. These soldiers would then have developed a whistled language to avoid revealing their position and the content of their discussions, a practice subsequently picked up by the locals. Another theory suggests that the language was created by the inhabitants of Evia in the Middle Ages, as they moved inland to protect themselves against Sicilian and Venetian pirates. According to this theory, they invented this method to warn each other of further attacks and hide.

According to Dimitra Hengen, a Greek linguist who spoke to BBC Travel, sfyria is effectively a whistled version of spoken Greek, in which letters and syllables correspond to distinct tones and frequencies. Because whistled sound waves differ from speech, messages in sfyria can travel up to 4km across open valleys, roughly 10 times farther than shouting.

What is striking is that sfyria was only discovered by the rest of the world in 1969, when an aeroplane crashed in the mountains behind Antia. While the crew was searching for the missing pilot, they witnessed the shepherds exchange messages across the canyons in this way.