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.

Like the Kele in Congo, the Yoruba of Nigeria (above) use talking drums to communicate. (Wikimedia Commons)

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