Published
Aug 16, 2026 8:01 AM EDT
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There’s a video on YouTube, filmed back in 2019, where 100 random people try to whistle on camera. About half of them fail, often spectacularly. But partway through, the video flashes through the 50 or so who succeed, and something interesting jumps out: at a glance, every single one of them appears to be making the identical shape with their mouth. Look closely, and the shape is surprisingly specific. The lips pull back slightly at the corners, rather than pucker forward. A small, round opening is left in the middle: It’s closer to the width of a pencil than the wide “O” most people imagine.
All of this raises an obvious question: If the ability to whistle really does require making a specific shape with your mouth, why can’t everyone seem to figure it out? And more to the point: Can some people truly, genuinely not whistle, no matter how hard they try?
According to Francisco Ruiz, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology who studies the acoustics of whistling, true anatomical impossibility is rare. For most people, he says, it’s simply a matter of practice. “It’s more like riding a bicycle,” he says. “You fall many times, and finally you get it.”
For a small number of people, certain physical conditions really do make whistling impossible, no matter how hard they try. “You need to get your lip geometry right, and then you need to get the geometry of your tongue against your palate right,” Ruiz says. “If you have somebody with a cleft palate [a congenital condition where the roof of the mouth doesn’t fully close], they just won’t be able to whistle, because they won’t be able to make that constriction [the narrow gap where air passes] correctly.”
If, like me, you’re a little horrified at the idea that something as fun as whistling involves “geometry,” don’t worry: Nobody’s handing you a protractor. Your mouth is already an expert at making precise shapes without you noticing.
But outside of cleft palates and other conditions that affect mouth geometry, most people who struggle with whistling aren’t dealing with a hard “can’t.” It’s more a matter of degree, harder for some than others, but rarely impossible.
Age plays a real role, too. Maureen Stone, a speech scientist and professor emerita at the University of Maryland School of Dentistry, compares learning to whistle as an adult to picking up a new language later in life.
“If you take an adult and move them to a new country and tell them to learn a new language, they’re probably always going to have an accent,” she says. “But if you take a child and move them to a new country, it’s not a problem.”
The turning point, she says, is puberty. Whistling depends on precise muscle control in the lips and tongue, and once puberty hits, those same muscles become less adaptable.
“It’s harder, in effect, to teach an old dog new tricks,” Stone says.
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