Maria Garcia is as hip as any 11-year-old in Seoul, Seattle or Sydney. Here at the Lomada School on La Gomera, the second-smallest of Spain's seven Canary Islands, she has a cell phone tucked into the waistband of her trousers, which leave a fashionably bare patch of tanned tummy. But Maria and her classmates are also masters of a form of low-tech communication that doesn't require batteries or microwaves. Along with about 1,800 other schoolchildren on this rugged volcanic island, Maria is a student of El Silbo, the Gomera whistle, a substitute language based on four consonant and two vowel sounds. At a time when the boom in global communications risks swamping cultures and minority languages, little La Gomera has put its tradition where its mouth is.

Shaping a finger like the letter U and inserting it to one side of the mouth, the islanders learned to communicate across the hills and valleys of the roughly circular island, 26 km at its widest. There were no roads until 1935, and in the central village of

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nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) Igualero there was only one public phone as late as 1993. Townsfolk used their traditional whistle language to announce, "Call for you, Pedro!"

Today, La Gomera remains home to about 18,000 residents, and tourism is helping to stanch emigration by those no longer able to make a living from farming or fishing. Ferries make the 40-minute trip from Tenerife, and one of the attractions, apart from a rich flora in the cloud-shrouded peaks, the highest of which is just under 1,500 m above sea level, is the chance to hear whistle-speak. When Eugenio Darias was born in 1950, phones were still a novelty. "I learned the Silbo playing in the street," he recalls. "If you didn't want to do a lot of climbing up and down to find people, you had to." But as roads, radios and telephones arrived, the Silbo declined to the point where an evolutionary truism — use it or lose it — was about to kick in.

To rescue the tradition, the regional government in 2000 made learning the Silbo compulsory, and today Darias teaches it to the 164 students at Lomada School. He coordinates the work of two Silbo teachers to cover the island's 14 other schools. Students aged 7 to 14 do half an hour of whistling a week; those under 7 do 15 minutes to acquaint them with the technique. The Silbo employs ch, y, g and k sounds, plus the vowels a and i. "The sounds are approximate to spoken Spanish," says Darias. "Some words, such as catarro [a cold] and cacharro [a cooking utensil], sound much the same, as do nada [nothing] and lana [wool]. Context tells you which."

To test whether this is all lana over the visitor's eyes, Darias is asked to bring in some of his students. Antonio Ramos, Ivan Conrado, twins Paula and Mirta Rodriguez, Maria Garcia and Raico Sanchez do him proud. Maria whistles Antonio's name. He makes a sound that Darias spells out as fuio, which in Silbo means "What do you want?" She asks him the time. Antonio blasts back that it's 11:30 a.m. Paula Rodriguez is asked to whistle to her twin Mirta: "Have you seen my glasses?" Mirta silbos back: "You're wearing them." To the uninitiated, it's all trill and squawk, requiring translation into Spanish by Darias.

Later in the playground, Maria whistles to a boy called Luis. After he gives her the fuio acknowledgment she tells him to come and shake a visitor's hand. Luis does so. Teacher Darias explains that coverage depends on topography, wind and the whistler's lungs: "In a valley, the Silbo can be heard 2,500 m away." The youngsters at Lomada School are proud of their tradition, which has the advantage of being a secret code. And Maria of the mobile says it still has practical uses. "Say I'm at my grandmother's house and she wants my grandad to bring her some parsley when he returns from their plot 200 m away. I can stand at the door and tell him." Fuio! They can't do that in Seoul, Seattle or Sydney.

• ROD USHER | La Gomera
• Rod Usher explains how islanders saved their rare nonverbal language