"Are Turks natural born tweeters?"

5, 2013 10:30 PM


Tweeting Is Big in Turkish Town, but Not the Kind Done on Twitter

Still, Whistlers Fear Their Trilled Language Can't Keep Up With Tuneless Texts

'Bird Language' or Kus Dili, is a centuries-old whistled dialect used to communicate across hillsides in the village of Kuskoy, Turkey. Will it survive the digital age? WSJ's Joe Parkinson reports.

By

• Joe Parkinson

KUSKOY, Turkey—Many people aren't connected to the Internet in this remote hilltop village. But tweeting is a very big deal.

Residents here have for centuries communicated with one another using a series of elaborately trilled whistles known as "bird language."

Living on the fertile slopes above Turkey's Black Sea coast, they have honed an earsplitting warble that can reverberate for nearly a mile.

Kuskoy literally translates as "bird village," and locals say their ancestors first developed the tuneful tradition around 500 years ago. The language is essentially a whistled dialect of Turkish, with each syllable rendered in one of about 20 sounds.

The trilled "speech" springs from a cacophony of complex techniques combining tongue, teeth and fingers and really does resemble bird song.

Neighbors lean over the fence to tweet greetings, instructions for harvesting hazelnuts or to invite one another over for a cup of locally plucked tea.

"Come over here for a cup!" Servet Kugu trills to his neighbor, as he stands in a valley bracketed by sheer hillsides. "Give me 10 minutes. I'll be there," Hakan Eroglu, some 400 yards away, whistles back.

Local officials insist their traditional tweeting can survive in a digital age, and it remains almost heresy to speak ill of whistling here.

But the high-pitched tradition is under threat.

While decades of slow modernization helped preserve the language, many locals have in recent years swapped whistling for cellphones.

A rising tide of the village's youngsters are drawn from Kuskoy's tuneful hills to the bright lights of Turkey's booming cities.

"We love this tradition, but these days, the children never let go of their phones," said Ramazan Calik, a 35-year-old tea farmer who moved from Kuskoy to the nearby city of Rize with his five children, none of whom can whistle bird language proficiently. "I want my children to learn, but it's hard when they don't have the same use for it as we did years ago."

The man spearheading efforts to repopularize Kuskoy's high-pitched tradition is Şeref Kocek, head of Kuskoy's Bird Language Association and organizer of the village's annual bird-whistling festival.

The sharp-suited Mr. Kocek, a Kuskoy native and self-proclaimed "amateur" whistler, says he wants to showcase the village as a "world whistling capital" to boost tourism and funnel more money into the region. Since he took the helm of the whistling association five years ago, he has expanded the annual festival; Starting in September, two of the village's top whistlers will be paid a state salary to teach what will become the world's first publicly funded whistling classes in Kuskoy, Mr. Kocek said.

"Our purpose is to promote bird language in our country and across the world," Mr. Kocek said on the sidelines of this year's festival in July as he rushed to coordinate local officials, musicians and whistlers. "We know that the world is talking about the new kind of tweeting, but we want to show the world our more traditional tweeting, too."

Mr. Kocek says he been successful in doubling the number of festival visitors to 5,000, but his whistling evangelism faces serious headwinds.

At this year's bird-language festival, attendees who jammed into Kuskoy appeared far less interested in whistling than dancing to local folk music or shopping at pop-up stalls selling goods that included kebab skewers and power tools.

The annual whistling championship, where competitors relay instructions across a valley before a panel of judges, featured only eight competitors and lasted around 15 minutes. It was watched attentively by a group of Turkish journalists but largely ignored by festival visitors.

This year's champion, Esma Kodalak, has won the title for two of the past four tournaments and confesses that even her son, Emre, hasn't learned to whistle because he prefers to use a cellphone.

"Technology can be a killer of the arts and this case is no different," said Mahmut Salcan, an official from Turkey's Culture Ministry, who attended the festival with a troupe of folk dancers from Azerbaijan. Old-school tweeting, he said, "is unlikely to survive for too long."

Kuskoy isn't the only place where whistled languages have thrived then declined: There are a handful of other villages in similarly remote regions of Mexico, Greece and Spain where treacherous ground and sparse population made travel difficult even over short distances. Warbling has waned in those areas, too.

But Kuskoy believes it boasts the largest concentration of whistlers on the planet and is best placed to guard the tradition against the encroachment of modern technology.

"Whistling is in people's genes here; the best whistlers are artists and everyone knows them. Technology won't wipe that away," said Riza Kuyu, a 56-year-old hazelnut farmer who describes his own whistling as "decent, but way below competition standard."

Kuskoy's top whistlers may make bird language look easy, but it is a far cry from pursing your lips to accompany your favorite pop song.

Each whistler has his or her own style, but three techniques are particularly popular, explained Ibrahim Kodalak, a veteran whistler chosen to be Turkey's first official whistling teacher when classes begin in the fall.

The first, popular with purists, sees the whistler invert, then contort, the tongue against the back of the teeth. Another sees two pinkies pressed against the tongue, for extra shrill. Some whistlers place a hooked index finger inside the cheek—a move helpful for those with false teeth.

"Here, whistling is our mother tongue and we won't allow it to die," said Mr. Kodalak.

-Yeliz Candemir and Gokce Sanlialp contributed to this article.

Write to Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com  



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