Kickapoo whistled speech

Okay kiddo, have you ever tried to talk to someone from far away and they can't hear you? People used to have that problem all the time, especially if they lived in big open spaces like the prairie. But the Kickapoo people found a way to solve that problem: they invented a way of talking that was louder than normal talking, almost like a whistle. This is called "Kickapoo whistled speech".

Here's how it works: Instead of using your vocal cords to make sounds like when you speak normally, you use your lips and tongue to shape your breath into whistling sounds. It's kind of like when you blow across the top of a bottle to make a whistle sound. The Kickapoo people learned how to make lots of different whistling sounds, and each sound has a different meaning. For example, one whistle might mean "hello", while another might mean "come here". This way, they could communicate with each other from far away and be heard over long distances.

It might sound kind of strange to us, since we're used to talking normally with our voices, but for the Kickapoo people, it was just another way of talking. They even developed their own alphabet using the whistling sounds. Pretty cool, huh?