The Linguists: Searching for Endangered Languages Around the World

by Jessica Mosby
– USA –

Linguistics, the study of languages, is generally not interesting for people who are not linguists. Filming the daily work of a linguist – reading and listening – is an idea better suited for a sleep aid than a 70 minute documentary film. But The Linguists, which follows the work of Dr. K. David Harrison and Dr. Gregory Anderson, should not be written off as esoteric. The film’s stars are more like Indiana Jones-style adventurers traveling to remote locations in search of undocumented and dying languages than stodgy academics.

What makes The Linguists so entertaining are the stars’ contagious love of linguistics; between them they speak over 25 languages and have devoted their professional lives to traveling around the world – on screen they venture to Siberia, India, and Bolivia – documenting obscure languages on the verge of extinction. Their work is exciting because Harrison and Anderson are up against the clock: currently there over 7,000 languages spoken around the world, but one is disappearing every two weeks.

Tall and easy-going, Harrison is a professor of Linguistics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and the author of When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge (which is currently only available in English). Anderson calls him a “sponge” for foreign languages and an expert at sounds – he also has a penchant for wearing fleece, which completes his wholesome look nicely. The film has made him a celebrity of sorts; he’s appeared on the Colbert Report where he taught Stephen Colbert to say, “I’m going to stab you in the gut with a knife” in Sora.

Anderson is the bearded, dark-haired “verb guy” who shares Harrison’s love of fleece and camping-inspired clothing. When he isn’t globe-trotting, he works as the Director of the Oregon-based Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. Having had a life-long love for language, he says, “Around the age of eight or nine I discovered I had a somewhat irrational interest in the world’s languages.” So his current career choice is no surprise.

Both linguists are interested in more than just documenting endangered languages – they go into great depth about the sociological, political, and economic reasons why languages are disappearing.

The extinction of languages is in part the result of colonization and the oppression of native cultures. In India, the linguists search for speakers of Sora, a tribal language spoken by approximately 300,000 people in India’s Orissa state. The language is endangered in part because children from Orissa are sent to boarding schools where English and Hindi are the instructional languages. Languages die when children decide, or are forced, to stop using their ancestral language, and older speakers die without sharing their knowledge with younger generations.

Economics is also a factor; many people stop using their native language when they learn another that offers greater employment and educational opportunities. In Siberia, the dominance of Russian has killed most of the smaller indigenous languages. Harrison and Anderson travel to Siberia to study Chulym – a language that has not been documented for over 30 years. After taking a census in the rural community of around 420 people (all of whom speak Russian), they find seven Chulyms who are fluent speakers. But many of the native speakers are elderly and, ironically, deaf. Since the youngest fluent speaker they meet is in his 50s, the language will probably be extinct in 25 years.

The story of endangered languages is really the story of oppression. In Siberia, the Soviets forbid and even punished children from speaking their native languages in school. In the United States, Native American children were sent to boarding schools to learn English. This policy of instilling a sense of cultural inferiority encourages people to abandon their native tongues and even feel embarrassed about their native cultures; Harrison and Anderson’s Siberian taxi driver initially won’t even admit that he knows Chulym, much less that he is fluent.

Harrison and Anderson’s adventures border on slapstick. There are misunderstandings perpetuated by people not speaking the same language, dangerous encounters solved by bribery, and some disagreements that are inevitable when any sleep-deprived Westerner travels to a place without “proper” bathrooms.

When they travel to Bolivia to find people who speak Kallawaya – a language native to medicinal healers in the Andes – Anderson becomes sick and cannot hide his crabbiness. Some of the healers they interview offer to help, and the result is a classic fish-out-of-water routine involving a ritual with dead rodents. Kallawaya is an incredibly interesting language, spoken by less than 100 people who did not learn the language during infancy; rather, healers only learn Kallawaya as they learn the medicine and rituals associated with the language.

Though Harrison and Anderson are comical as they travel around the world searching for native speakers of these dying languages, some of the film’s focus is probably too idiosyncratic for the average viewer – they were very excited by Sora’s numbering system. But their mission to document languages before they are gone, and, in turn, to help people reconnect with their ancestral history is inspiring.

Harrison and Anderson’s work instills a sense of pride in members of oppressed and underrepresented cultures. After decades of feeling ashamed and embarrassed by their culture, the Chulyms have a look of pure delight when they see themselves speaking their native language on film. The film also makes the history and unique cultural practices of endangered indigenous languages accessible to people who have never even heard of Sora, Chulym, and Kallawaya.

Every 14 days a language disappears, and with that language more than just words are lost. Our only hope is that Harrison and Anderson can swoop in, like the linguistic adventurers they are, and document these languages before time runs out.

– All images appear courtesy of the Sundance Film Festival.

About the Author
Jessica Mosby is a writer and critic living in Berkeley, California. In the rare moments when she’s not traveling across the United States for work, Jessica enjoys listening to public radio, buying organic food at local farmers markets, trolling junk stores, and collecting owl-themed tchotchke.