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 ku__ş dili, or “bird language,” have occasionally struggled up the footpaths and dirt roads that lead to Kuşköy. So its thousand or so residents were not all that surprised when, a few years ago, a Turkish-born German biopsychologist named Onur Güntürkün showed up and asked them to participate in a study. 
 
 Photograph courtesy Onur Güntürkün 
 
 Whistled languages, although unusual, have been around for centuries. Herodotus described communities in Ethiopia whose residents “spoke like bats,” and reports of the whistled language that is still used in the Canary Islands date back more than six hundred years. Most of the forty-two examples that have been documented in recent times arose in places with steep terrain or dense forests—the Atlas Mountains, in northwestern Africa; the highlands of northern Laos, the Brazilian Amazon—where it might otherwise be hard to communicate at a distance. All are based on spoken languages: Kuşköy’s version, for example, adapts standard Turkish syllables into piercing tones that can be heard from more than half a mile away. The phrase “Do you have fresh bread?,” which in Turkish is “Taze ekmek var mı?,” becomes, in bird language, six separate whistles made with the tongue, teeth, and fingers. 
 
 For Güntürkün, whistled Turkish was not only a fascinating cultural oddity but also an exciting natural experiment. How, he wondered, does the brain handle a language that renders words as something like music? Although neuroscientists have long understood that brain functions do not divide cleanly between the left and right hemispheres, the left hemisphere appears to play a consistently dominant role in our understanding of language—regardless of whether the language is tonal or atonal, spoken or written, signed with the hands or clicked with the tongue. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, seems to govern our understanding of pitch, melody, and rhythm. In Kuşköy, Güntürkün tested this cranial division of labor by recruiting thirty-one volunteers, all fluent in both spoken and whistled Turkish, to listen to pairs of different syllables played simultaneously through headphones, one in each ear. When he gave them spoken Turkish, the participants usually understood the syllable played through the right speaker, suggesting that the left hemisphere was processing the sound. When he switched to whistled Turkish, however, the participants understood both syllables in roughly equal measure, suggesting that both hemispheres played significant roles in the early stages of comprehension. 
 
 Although the technique that Güntürkün used, called dichotic listening, isn’t as precise as laboratory techniques for measuring brain activity, his results, published in today’s issue of Current Biology, are tantalizing. “They tell us that the organization of our brain, in terms of its asymmetrical structure, is not as fixed as we assume,” he told me. “The way information is given to us appears to change the architecture of our brain in a radical way.” He now wonders whether people whose spoken-language comprehension is damaged by a left-hemisphere stroke could learn to understand a whistled dialect, much as some people with stroke-damaged speech can communicate by singing. 
 
 The opportunity to study whistled Turkish, however, is fading. In 1964, a stringer for the Times reported that children in Kuşköy were learning to communicate by whistling before they started school, and that both men and women regularly gossiped, argued, and even courted via whistle. Three years later, a team of visiting linguists observed that whistling was widely used in both the village and the surrounding countryside. But Güntürkün found that few, if any, young women had learned the language, and that, although some young men were fluent whistlers, they had learned the skill as teen-agers, more out of pride than any practical need. In recent years, the town has organized a whistling contest to encourage both tourism and cultural preservation, but the bird language is rapidly disappearing from daily life. In a small town filled with nosy neighbors, texting affords a level of privacy that whistling never did. 
 
 From time to time, though, whistled Turkish still comes in handy. When the residents of Kuşköy call Güntürkün’s university office, they often reach his secretary, who speaks German. When that happens, he says, they know exactly how to make themselves understood: they just whistle. ||||| Jameson, a 6-year-old husky, pokes his nose into the camera lens at Raven's Husky Haven and Rescue in 2014 in Sycamore, Ill. (Danielle Guerra/Daily Chronicle/AP) 
 
 If you visited Iceland and asked someone what they called the smelling organ in the middle of their face, they'd tell you, nev. In Japan, it's hana. To Sar speakers in southern Chad it's kon, and among the Zuni tribe of the southwestern United States. it's noli. In fact, you could go to more than 1,400 places around the world, question speakers of more than 1,400 different languages, and hear 1,400 words that contain the sound "n." But all of them mean the same thing: nose. 
 
 That's one of the findings of a sweeping study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Monday, which found evidence of strong associations between the sounds in words and the ideas they represent in completely unrelated languages from all corners of the world. Despite a long-standing assumption in linguistics that the sounds we pick to signify certain concepts are arbitrary, the researchers argue that at least some associations are more universal than you'd think. 
 
 "Most models for how words come into our lexicon are predicated on this assumption that the sound doesn't tell you anything about what it represents," said Jaime Reilly, a cognitive psychologist and speech pathologist at Temple University who was not involved in the study. "So the really neat thing about this paper is it sort of questions whether that arbitrariness assumption actually holds across all words." 
 
 "It's going to end up being a very important study," he said. 
 
 A century ago, Ferdinand de Saussure — one of the founders of modern linguistics — wrote about the arbitrary relationship between signals (or the words we use) and the signified (the concepts we're trying to describe). For example, there is nothing inherent about the term "cat" that calls to mind the fluffy, mildly standoffish felines we keep in our homes. That we can say "cat" and other English speakers know what we're talking about is a result of convention. 
 
 [Big, bad wolf or bad, big wolf? The surprising way we order our words.] 
 
 It's a hallmark of what makes human languages unique among animal communication systems, said Morten Christiansen, a language scientist at Cornell University and one of the authors of the PNAS study. "In other animal systems there’s more a direct relationship between what a signal means and what comes across." 
 
 Humans, on the other hand, are sophisticated enough to come up with tens of thousands of otherwise meaningless sounds and be able to keep track of exactly what they stand for. 
 
 Still, there have been hints that the sounds we choose for certain concepts aren't entirely random. A series of studies starting in 1929 have documented what's called the "bouba/kiki" effect: People from societies across the world almost universally associate round shapes with the made-up word "bouba" and spiky shapes with the non-word "kiki." Within languages, research has shown that sounds can become associated with ideas — for example, English words having to do with sight, like "glance," "glimmer" and "glare," all start with the sound "gl." And Reilly was co-author on a recent study that found that English speakers can distinguish between words for concrete terms and those representing abstract concepts, even when the words come from languages they don't understand. 
 
 This notion that vocal sounds carry meaning in and of themselves, and that meaning can be mapped onto the ideas they're used to represent, is called "sound symbolism." Though linguists have acknowledged its existence for decades, "it's been sort of marginalized as not being super contributory to how languages evolve," Reilly said. 
 
 Christiansen's work pushes sound symbolism back to the forefront. He and his team, which included statisticians, neuroscientists, physicists and computer scientists, examined the words for 100 concepts in more than 6,000 languages in search of commonalities. They weren't looking for universal rules — just examples of associations that popped more often than you'd expect due to pure chance. 
 
 "We took a big data approach," Christiansen said. "We were trying to see if, for a given concept, are people across the world more likely to use a particular sound in association with this concept." 
 
 [Make way for ducklings — they're smarter than you think] 
 
 To eliminate the influence of geographic relationships, shared sounds would only be considered symbolic if they appeared in languages from at least three of the world's six large and relatively isolated areas: North America, South America, Eurasia, Africa, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific islands, and Australia. The researchers also controlled for a false discovery rate of about 5 percent in order to weed out the possibility of false positives. 
 
 In the end, they found 30 concepts that were strongly associated with certain "signals." For example, words for "round" were extremely likely to contain the letter "r," including kokoro (from the indigenous Colombian language Ika), biribil (from the Basque language of northwestern Spain) and aridonda (from the Chamorro language spoken in the Mariana islands). "Sand" was associated with the "s" sound. 
 
 Some concepts were negatively associated with particular sounds — "skin" is especially likely to not contain "m" or "n," and "eye" probably won't contain the sound "a." Also, not all of the rules apply to all languages — in many cases, English was an outlier. So if you're reading this article, you might be surprised to learn that most words for "dog" contain the sound "s," and "you" usually doesn't have an "o" or "u" in it. 
 
 "What we think is the really exciting part, is independent of linguistic lineage, independent of whether languages are historically related to one another and independent of geographical location we see these signals showing up over and over again across the world," Christiansen said. 
 
 Exactly how associations evolved is fodder for several lifetimes of future research, he added. Christiansen and his colleagues considered whether it could be a result of evolution from some prehistoric protolanguage spoken by the earliest humans, but various statistical analyses ruled that possibility out. 
 
 That leaves "something psychological and universal as a factor that gives a slight edge to a few sound-meaning associations," Johanna Nichols, a prominent linguist and professor emerita at the University of California in Berkeley, wrote in an email. 
 
 It seems there is something biological about our association of certain sounds with ideas. For a few of Christiansen's concepts, the explanation appears straightforward. The "n" in nose (and nev and hana and kon and noli) is nasal, requiring that we speak through the very organ we're trying to describe. Things that are small make high-pitched, squeaking sounds, just like the "i" in tiny, sagheer (Arabic) and liten (Norwegian). For other associations, the link between signal and signified is more opaque. 
 
 This doesn't mean that Saussure was completely wrong about arbitrariness. Though words like nose may share some commonalities, most of the terms in the average adult's 80,000-word vocabulary represent abstract concepts that aren't easily represented with concrete sounds. When words for the same concept do resemble each other, it is usually a sign that they share an etymological root. 
 
 "It is still true that for the most part the relation of a word's meaning to its consonants and vowels is arbitrary. That is what makes historical comparison possible in the first place," Nichols wrote. For example, the fact that the words for "two" in Romance and Slavic languages almost always start with d "isn't due to some inherent naturalness but is a quirk likely to be inherited," she continued — evidence that the languages share a family history. 
 
 "That still stands," Nichols said, "but we now have to add those grains of salt." 
 
 Read more: 
 
 Dear Science: If an animal is lost or injured, why shouldn't I help it? 
 
 Rosetta orbiter will soon crash into its comet and die 
 
 Scientists like Barack Obama so much that they named a parasite after him 
 
 Giraffes aren't just giraffes. Turns out there are four species.
– The rapidly disappearing "bird language" that is spoken—or whistled, actually—by about 10,000 residents in the mountains of Turkey is changing the way scientists think about language and the brain. The left hemisphere has always been dominant when interpreting language, be it spoken, written, signed, or even clicked, explains New Scientist. But that changed when German researcher Onur Güntürkün decided to study the whistled version of Turkish. Güntürkün wanted to see if its musicality might require the brain's right hemisphere, which handles frequency, pitch, and melody. His study of 31 whistled Turkish speakers showed the left hemisphere was 75% dominant with spoken Turkish, but the split between hemispheres was even with the whistled language. "We’ve shown for the first time equal contributions from both hemispheres," says Güntürkün, whose study was published in Current Biology. He tells the New Yorker that this suggests our brain structure "is not as fixed as we assume" and that the way information is delivered changes it. The language developed because whistles carry further than spoken words, and its messages can be understood across mountains and valleys. (The New Yorker offers an example of a whistle that means, "Do you have fresh bread?") It's lucky Güntürkün got his study in when he did, as modern technology is killing off whistled Turkish. "You can gossip with a mobile phone, but you can't do that with whistling because the whole valley hears," he says. (But, how does any of this explain how one man could lose most of his brain and not even notice?)