Whistle, click and live in the present!

In order to become an interpreter, it is necessary to choose between a small amount of our world's languages and so I ended up stydying German, English and Russian. Without a doubt, each of these languages is fascinating, but there are some others that caught my interest from the very first moment I heard of them.

Whistle!

How you do it

Whistle like you've never whistled before, so that people on the other side of the valley, the river or
even the gorge can hear you. Do it like the inhabitants of La Gomera, which is one of the smaller islands in the Canaries. They speak Silbo Gomero, a whistled language. Fine... but... how does it work?
The speakers of this language try to imitate the articulation of a Spanish dialect through whistling. They distinguish between four vowels and eight consonants and differentiate them through the pitch, the intensity, the quality, the volume and the continuity.

A short introduction into the language and its importance for the inhabitants of La Gomera from the perspective of the speakers: It is worth checking out.

Click!

Xhosa people

Let's continue our journey around the world. Next stop: South Africa. Xhosa, the language supported by click consonants, is spoken by a large amount of people living in the far south of Africa. As a member of the Bantu language family, Xhosa is a tonal language, with a few exceptions. The letters "c", "x" and "q" are clicked, each of them produced in a different part of the mouth. The letter "c" combines six dental clicks: You need to click your tonuge right behind your teeth, as if you said something like "tsk". The "x" clicks are produced on the sides of the tonuge and the "q" clicks are made at the roof of the mouth by the tip of your tongue.

Of course you can try it yourself with a little help from a native speaker. :)

Maici River, the Pirahã definitely live in paradise

Live in the present!

Last, but definitely not least, I want to introduce you to the Pirahã language which is spoken by people living along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon. 
Every relative of the language family Pirahã belongs to, is extinct. That's the reason for its uniqueness. I'll try to give you an overview of the most unusual features:

Phonology: The Pirahã's language consists of only three vowels. There are a few more consonants but by far not as much as in any European language. It is quite easy to imitate the sound of Pirahã because the phones are much the same as in German, there are only less of them.

Kinship terms: Pirahã do not differentiate between mother and father. They are simply parents. With kinship terms they only go as far as biological siblings, not like Europeans who are proud to be the great-great-grandson/daughter of someone.

Numbers: In my opinion, this is a very complicated topic because Pirahã do not know any number above "two". As a result, the whole system of handling them is different. To give you an example: You have ten nails and ask a Pirahã how many you have, the answer is "many". If you now took four of them away, they would of course use a different word because there are less nails. The strange thing is, though, that they use a completely different word if you had two nails and put another two down. In both situations there are four nails in the end, but for a Pirahã that would be two different "numbers". On the right, you see the resulting table of an experiment. If you understand every aspect about this table, please let me know...

Colors: There are words for "light" and "dark". If they want to name a specific color they describe it through a thing they know, for example, "like grass" for "green".

Tenses: Pirahã live in the present, so they do not know any words or forms to express something that happened in the future or in the past. That is, in my opinion, the most amazing feature of this unusual language.

It is necessary to say, even though most of you probably know it, that the Pirahã could use color terms, numbers and tenses if they wanted to. They just do not need them in any way, as they are happy without them.

Finally, a video, recorded by Daniel Everett who lived with the Pirahã, learned to speak their language, analysed it and translated it into English. 

Sources: 
El Silbo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Silbo
http://www.gomeralive.com/el-silbo/
http://silbo-gomero.com/silbohome.html
Xhosa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/xhosa.htm
Pirahã: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001387.html
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/piraha.php
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language