Do You Speak Warblish?

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The question Who cooks for you? doesn’t come up terribly often in natural conversation—unless you’re a birder, that is. Those familiar with the soundscapes of eastern forests or lowland swamps know the phrase has nothing to do with dinner: It’s common shorthand for the percussive hoots that emanate from the Barred Owl, one entry in a rich, cross-cultural tradition of human voices trying to mimic avian sounds.

For generations, people have used their own languages to catalog the chirps and trills emanating around them. Many of these imitations have become iconic elements of a bird’s persona; it’s hard to separate crows from their caw, or chickens from their cock-a-doodle-doo. And, beyond onomatopoeia, birders have found pairing calls with mnemonic phrases can help sort an Eastern Towhee (drink your tea!) from a White-throated Sparrow (old Sam Peabody!).

In recent decades, researchers from ornithology to folklore have become more interested in thehistory and cultural importance of pairing birdsong with verbal language. In linguistics, the concept of homophonic translation usually refers to instances when people try to bring sounds from languages they don’t know into a more familiar tongue. But in 2016, the linguist Hannah Sarvasymade the case that the practice isn’t just about people translating other people. Using words to interpret bird sounds deserved its own name, she said—and the term she proposed? “Warblish.” 

Many of the mnemonics birders know and love can fall under the warblish umbrella. But, especially outside of North America, the practice is about more than memorization. Warblish seems to be a fairly universal phenomenon—stretching back centuries and traversing the globe—and it often hints about people’s relationships with birds, each other, and the natural world. Some phrases allude to local legend; others mark the time of day or year or chatter about what’s happening in farms and forests. Who needs a weather app when a Red-capped Lark advises, in Southern African Khoi, to om  ̇ dire! (fix up the hut!) before a storm shows up?

Thirteen years ago, Sarvasy first came across inklings of warblish when she began research for her doctoral thesis in Papua New Guinea. As she sat with Papuans to learn and document their languages, she kept coming back to birds, jotting down notes about more than 200 of them and the characteristics people would reflexively include. That might encompass a species’ size or coloring, she remembers, “but always its call.” Many times, the call was expressed not using abstract noises but in phrases with coherent meanings. Some words might even come from a language spoken far from that village—a sign that just as the birds were circulating, so was knowledge about them. 

Warblish interpretations are “not just an artwork by one person—it’s a community at some level,” Sarvasy says. Not every instance of warblish is worth decoding in much detail, to be sure—it’s hard to imagine adding much context to the Kyss en skit! (kiss a shit!) said to come from Sweden’s Great Tits, or, more familiar to Americans, the Mountain Chickadee’s Cheeseburger! 

But in other instances, the phrases inscribe knowledge people have gathered across generations, relating to the way the seasons change, when the crops should be harvested, and which animals or even people might be best avoided.  

“It’s a useful thing for intergenerational continuity,” Sarvasy explains. “In a culture without writing, you either have traditional stories that are passed on, that are taken good care of, or you have things like nursery rhymes, these scraps of folklore that preserve things.” 

In that vein—in cultures with or without writing—warblish can encode natural relationships that help people attune to observations worth remembering. Australia’s Striated Pardalote, known to call when animals approach, sings Ipenye-petyme in Eastern Central Arrertne, or stranger coming. In Samoa, the Eastern Wattled Honey Eater warns, Get away! Get away! (Alu ese! Alu ese!), a sign that lulus, or Barn Owls, may be inbound to prey on chickens. The Blackfeet of the U.S. Great Plains listen as the White-throated Sparrow announces, The leaves are budding and summer is coming. 

Though the word for warblish is relatively new, the idea is far from it, says Helen Innes, a writer from New Zealand who documented more than 1,500 examples of the practice across 55 languages for the forthcoming book Warblish and Chirpish, out later this year. “It’s a literary form,” she says—the best warblish phrases often bring in lyrical tools like alliteration and assonance, just like other forms of creativity. The phrases also benefit when their authors can tightly match the original patterns and rhythms of a song, she adds.

Innes dug deep to track warblish across history, trawling through text from fiction to folklore, sometimes going weeks before finding her next example. Nineteenth century memoirs were particularly fruitful, especially when their authors wrote of experience working in forests or on farms. Those with closer connections to nature, she says, were more likely to have ears open to birdsong. 

One notable obstacle: Examples of warblish sometimes seemed to vanish from the page. “Often a first edition would have warblish and a second edition wouldn’t,” Innes says. That suggests that even if bird interpretations were usefully specific—as in when Serbia’s Golden Orioles would sing crvlijva glijva (worm-infested mushroom) to warn the fungi weren’t as fresh in late spring—the knowledge still wasn’t valued by editors, who might see it as folksy or antiquated.  

That kind of trend worries Felice Wyndham, an anthropologist who, with the linguist Karen Park, researches human-bird interactions and their effect on ecological conservation. “There’s been such a loss of language diversity alongside biodiversity loss,” she says. “It’s really been uncalculated to date.” And as communities forget the words and phrases that have tied them to to local habitats and species, Wyndham warns, the severed connections will make environmental shifts even harder to grasp.

“I have this sense that future generations aren’t even going to have a sense of what they’ve lost,” Park adds. 

But celebrating warblish is part of keeping that consciousness alive. Australia’s Green Catbird offers a phrase that might encapsulate the point best: Here I are, it sings, a reminder that the world speaks to us in countless ways, if only we’re willing to listen for it.