Identity of Vowel–Consonant Transitions in Sfyria: A Spectroacoustic Analysis of Whistled Speech

Sfyria is an endangered whistled speech variety located in the remote village of Antia on the Greek island of Evia. Like other whistled languages, it transposes spoken utterances into melodic whistles, preserving intelligibility over long distances. Our study examines how Sfyria encodes linguistic information through harmonic structure, focusing particularly on vowel-to-consonant transitions and the adaptation of segmental contrasts. Unlike tonal whistled languages, Sfyria relies on the transposition of formant patterns, particularly F2, into the first harmonic (H1) of the whistle. Drawing on a corpus of over 100 whistled utterances collected during fieldwork, we provide a detailed spectrographic analysis of vowel-consonant-vowel (VCV) sequences and explore how consonantal loci—acoustic points in the signal that indicate place of articulation—emerge from amplitude and frequency modulations and constitute a key cue in the encoding of consonant identity. The research reveals how Sfyria preserves phonological distinctions using a drastically simplified signal, highlighting the resilience of speech structure in alternative acoustic modalities.