A different kind of twitter: A look at languages without words

Some tribes still communicate in birdlike whistles, others use ‘talking’ drums. And, of course, there’s yodelling. Take a look, in this week’s Capital Letters.

We tend to think of body language as gestures, but it is so much more. The cues we draw from a person’s posture, expressions, facial tics and wordless sounds hark back to modes of communication from a time long before language. Fascinatingly, there are parts of the world where people are still quite at ease without words.

On La Gomera, Spain’s tiny mountainous Canary Island, a language called Silbo Gomero deploys a variety of whistles in place of words (“silbar”