The Linguists Film Commentary PDF

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TA: Yifan Yang Discussion time: 9am February 14, 2018 "The Linguists" Film Commentary “The Linguists” is a documentary following two linguists, Greg Anderson and David Harrison, who travel around the world to document and record the last speakers of many moribund and endangered languages. The languages studied and recorded in this documentary are Chulym in Siberia, Chemehuevi in Arizona, Sora in India, and Kallawaya in Bolivia. There are over 7,000 languages in the world and most of these are smaller languages that are disappearing very quickly. Anderson and Harrison care deeply about documenting these languages because when a language is endangered, a unique way of seeing the world could be lost. They interviewed people through a process called elicitation; they learned descriptions of things, ranging from body parts to colors and numbers. One of the least documented languages in Siberia is called Chulym. The majority of speakers died during a 30-year hiatus from the language. Anderson and Harrison wanted to find out how many speakers are left and what they know. They discovered that Chulym was viewed as a gutter language and that students felt ashamed to speak it in school. In Bolivia, they were searching for speakers of the language Kallawaya. They had extreme trouble finding anyone who really spoke Kallawaya. There were so few speakers of the language, they didn’t have access to any speakers that were left. In India, the Sora language has about 300,000 speakers. Despite this, the Sora have to use other languages to communicate. While watching “The Linguists,” what I found to be very impressive was the persistence the linguists had when trying to study the different languages despite the difficulties they

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encountered. If they gave up, they wouldn’t have been able to document the endangered or moribund languages and show the speakers of these languages how important they are. For example, I loved how the speakers were able to see the worth in their language when the linguists shared the footage with the people they filmed. Language death occurs partly because people see no reason or have no motivation to continue speaking the language. Also, languages are abandoned because they feel their language is not modern enough. To have these people see themselves and their language represented in a high-tech way shows them that their language and knowledge is really special. I found it interesting how people typically acquire their language the day they are born and become fluent speakers of that language by the age of 7 or 8. For the language Kallawaya, however, the language is transmitted from adult males to teenage males to free themselves of the medicinal knowledge. This demonstrates how the Kallawaya language is viewed poorly because it only serves one specific purpose. I found it fascinating how when the linguists were in Siberia studying Chulym, a problem they encountered was that most of the speakers were elderly, and it was hard for the elderly to communicate with them or hear them. This problem likely occurred because the language isn’t being passed down to the next generations, so only the older generations speak the language. “The Linguists” is an awakening documentary that shows everyone the truth about dying languages and how it only takes a small number of people to make a difference in preserving and documenting history....