In situations of telecommunication and proximal artistic performance, human groups have engineered diverse, ingenious formats of non-voiced auxiliary speech: (i) modulating the vocal tract to enhance selected acoustic features of a sound source alternative to the vocal cords; or (ii) adapting musical instruments to simulate aspects of the spoken phonetic signal. Both types of "surrogate language" (Nketia 1971) employ techniques of "speech abridgment" (Stern 1957) and coin novel "acoustic icons" (Sebeok & Umiker-Sebeok 1976). Auxiliary speech phenomena attest nonliterate traditions of text transmission and implicit mental capacities of natural language processing. This chapter provides a comparative view of these traditional special speech types worldwide. It shows that their various expressions depend on (a) the acoustic nature of the modified speech form, (b) the grammar of the base language, (c) the expertise of the performers, (d) but also whether they imitate spoken dialogues, declamative verbal arts or musical sung forms of speech. Case studies explore more details in the second part of the chapter.