André Batchelder-Schwabe

In communities around the world, individuals can hold conversations through whistling. These whistled communication systems are based on a diverse set of spoken languages which are completely different from each other genetically, areally, and typologically, suggesting that whistled language has evolved a number of separate times. There are dozens of varieties known to academics, most of which are merely attested as existing with little further linguistic work. Experts in the field note that whistled languages in Africa are extremely understudied, and suspect that many remain to be discovered. My dissertation aims to document isiXhosa, TshiVenda, and Kinande in detail in order to address this gap in the literature. This endeavor involves creating a blueprint based on preexisting and novel methods to help future researchers document whistled languages more easily.