Comparative Analysis of Early Studies on Turkish Whistle Language and a Case Study on Test Conditions

Abstract

This paper examines the early studies on Turkish Whistle Language and it argues that they have some controversial results. The study considers these issues need to be discussed and searched again in terms of linguistic and phonetic form. Unfortunately, there are few research studies on Turkish whistle language and most of them were performed nearly fifty years ago despite the fact that this language still has been used in Kuskoy region. Therefore, the findings of these early research studies could give valuable information to start to a new research study on the subject. The first scientific study on Turkish Whistle language was performed by a French scientist R.G. Busnel with his multidisciplinary research team in 1967. Some of this research’s results were published in the book. A Turkish scientist O. Baskan also participated in Busnel’s research group and published a paper on TWsL in 1968. However, some assertions such as people having a tendency to understand the Turkish whistle language with three vowels and three consonants have not been in the research results of R.G. Busnel. In addition, a Turkish scientist D. Aksan in Turkey had performed another research at Kuskoy region with his own team. Their test methods were different from the previous ones. This paper analyzes these research results on a comparative basis and presents the common and conflicted issues to discuss the uncertain points. The comparative evaluation of these past research studies aims to highlight the controversial position of the results on Turkish Whistle Language. In this scope, this paper opens a discussion about the selection of test conditions for an acoustic and linguistic analysis of the Turkish whistle language.