Most human communication is carried by modulations of the voice. However, a wide range of cultures has developed alternate forms of communication that make use of a whistled sound source. For example, whistling is used as a highly salient signal for capturing attention, can have iconic cultural meanings such as the cat-call, enact a formal code as in boatswain’s calls, or stand as a proxy for speech in whistled languages. We used real-time magnetic resonance imaging to examine the muscular control of whistling to describe a strong association between the shape of the tongue and the whistled frequency. This bioacoustic profile parallels the use of the tongue in vowel production. This is consistent with the role of whistled languages as proxies for spoken languages, in which one of the acoustical features of speech sounds are substituted with a frequency modulated whistle. Furthermore, previous evidence that non-human apes may be capable of learning to whistle from humans suggests that these animals may have similar sensorimotor abilities to those that are used to support speech in humans.