The Whistling Language of Aas

-There's gold in them thar hills. -That's not gold, it's snow. -It's cold. It's white. It's formed when tiny supercooled cloud droplets freeze. What would you call it? - Snow.

The view looking out of Lucca from our daily cycle on the city walls

I quoted yesterday from Graham Robb's chapter on the French language in his book, The Discovery of France, but omitted his account of the whistling language of Aas, partly on the grounds that I'd already included very long excerpts in the blog entry, but mostly because it seemed a bit too Beavis and Butthead. It's a brilliant little nugget, however, so here you are:

The Pyrenean village of Aas, at the foot of the Col d'Aubisque, above the spa town of Eax-Bonnes, had its own whistling language which was unknown even in the neighbouring valleys until it was mentioned on a television programme in 1959. Shepherds who spent the summer months in lonely cabins had evolved an ear-splitting, hundred-decibel language that could be understood at a distance of up to two miles. It was also used by the women who worked in the surrounding fields and was apparently versatile enough in the early twentieth century to convey the contents of the local newspaper. Its last known use was during the Nazi Occupation, when shepherds helped Jewish refugees, Résistants and stranded pilots to cross the border into Spain. A few people in Aas today remember hearing the language, but no one can reproduce the sounds and no recordings were ever made.

It all sounds a bit like one of the April Fools stories the newspapers feel obliged to come up with every year, but presumably he's done his research without being overly gullible. Anyway, there's probably more to be said about the whistling Aas language; I'll leave it to you to abuse the comment facility. If it turns out to get the most comments on the blog, however, I'll be upset.

Late breaking news...
The Signora Seffalice has just said she read something similar in the easyJet inflight magazine when she popped back to London last month. There's something incredibly disappointing about that that I can't quite put my finger on but probably has to do with my need to feel superior about the contents of my reading material. She doesn't think this whistling language was in France; wherever it was has apparently put it back on the local school curriculum as it was dying out. Please could one of you start composing a letter to The Telegraph on the subject of the new GCSE in whistling being easier than it was back in the fifties.