Whistled speech encodes a spoken language into a language of musical pitch that can communicate across much greater distances than the voice can shout. Whistled languages have arisen in history in cultures with inhabiting landscapes so rugged as to make face-to-face communication economically and physically costly. They have been used by herders and agriculturalists and have even been used by militaries as secret codes, as when the Guanches of the Canary Islands rebelled against the Spanish in 1488. Whistled speech in Sochi�pam Chinantec [cso] of Cuicatl�n, Oaxaca, Mexico has quickly fallen out of use in the community. It once had a central role in the day-to-day governing of the town where it was used as a channel to carry information across a difficult landscape informing local government authorities and committees of the times and places for meetings and carrying news up and down the mountainsides. Long distance whistled language has now been replaced with walkie-talkies. Today there are only about 25 elder men capable of using the code fluently. With support from the programs in Documenting Endangered Languages and Cultural Anthropology, this Rapid Response Research (RAPID) award will enable three researchers to carry out the documentation of a disappearing whistled language of Mexico and its cultural contexts of use. To respond to the serious endangerment and the absence of documentation an interdisciplinary team combining a cultural ecologist, an ethnographic linguist, and a videographer will record whistled speech in high-definition video and uncompressed audio, and work with Sochi�pam elders to transcribe the recordings. The investigators will host an educational workshop for the community during their work in Sochi�pam. The project materials will be useful for the speaker community in their efforts at cultural preservation, the intellectual community to understand how much of a language can remain perceptible when transformed into whistles, and to provide the raw video footage to develop a public television documentary, a valuable tool for educating the U.S. and Mexican publics about language endangerment.