MIT Lecture Series Committee

unrated

The Linguists (2008)

The screening will be followed by a discussion with David Harrison, an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Swarthmore College who is featured in the film.

The documentary film The Linguists premiered at Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews in February 2008, and is now appearing at film festivals across the country. It features David Harrison, Associate Professor of Linguistics at Swarthmore College and Greg Anderson, Director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. Prof. Noam Chomsky has characterized the film as "A breathtaking thrill ride through the landscape of language." [events.mit.edu]

Like modern-day explorers, the two academics featured in The Linguists travel to forgotten places around the globe to unearth rare treasures -- in this case, endangered languages. On a shoestring budget, professors David Harrison and Gregory Anderson navigate difficult terrain, searching for speakers of these forgotten and mostly hidden languages. While more than 7,000 different languages are currently spoken around the world, many are rapidly disappearing. Language diversity is shrinking as colonialism and economic unrest destroy traditional tribal tongues. When young people abandon their ancestral language, the passive suppression of their culture begins, and soon those languages will cease to exist.

Joining a traditional ceremony in a remote village in India, observing a Kallawaya healing ritual in Bolivia, and completing an arduous journey into Siberia is all part and parcel of heeding the urgent call. The word connoisseurs are well suited for the monumental task of researching and documenting native tongues; they speak 25 languages between them. These humble ethnographers are in a race against time to preserve the increasingly rare words, which are intricately linked to the vanishing traditions and heritage of Indigenous populations. Well-paced and laced with humor, The Linguists serves as an insightful, contemporary adventure film with a strong emphasis on cultural history. [www.sundance.org]

Indiana Jones' spirit certainly infects the intrepid heroes of "The Linguists." These are bold academics who plunge into the jungles and backwater villages of the world to rescue living tongues about to go extinct.
      -- Kirk Honeycutt, The Hollywood Reporter. Read this review.

Co-sponsored by the MIT Societo por Esperanto, Amnesty International, the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, and the GSC Funding Board.