Tweeting before Twitter
Meandering the mountain roads behind Turkey's Black Sea coast, one comes across isolated villages nestled in the hillsides. Some are inaccessible by car and require a few hours' walk across a valley. Cables stretched across the valleys to exchange goods and messages across a pulley are common site. In this context, the kuşdil (bird language), a language consisting of loud whistles developed among mountain residents to facilitate communication.
In modern times, the kuşdil began to give way to electronic communications. In an effort to preserve the language, locals began to host an annual "Bird Language Festival" in the aptly named village of Kuşköy (Bird Village) in the mountains behind Giresun beginning in 1997. Each year several thousand people converge in mid-July in Kuşköy to celebrate the annual festival.
This year, the festival and the language received added international attention due to the research of a Turkish-German scientist, Onur Göntürkün.
This is from the New Yorker article:
“The small town of Kuşköy, which is tucked into an isolated valley on the rainy, mountainous Black Sea coast of Turkey, looks much like the other villages in the region. Houses balance on steep hillsides beside tea fields and hazelnut orchards. A narrow white minaret and a small domed mosque stand beside a noisy creek. Kuşköy is remarkable not for how it looks but for how it sounds: here, the roar of the water and the daily calls to prayer are often accompanied by loud, lilting whistles—the distinctive tones of the local language. Over the past half-century, linguists and reporters curious about what locals call kuş dili, or “bird language,” have occasionally struggled up the footpaths and dirt roads that lead to Kuşköy.”