The Linguists: Preserving the World’s Languages

Of the world’s 7,000 languages, 2,800 are on their way to extinction at a stunning rate of one every two weeks. A new documentary from Ironbound Films titled The Linguists follows the journey of two men - researchers K. David Harrison and Greg Anderson – as they trek across the globe attempting to preserve them. And though the film portrays its fair share of harrowing escapades in an effort to lend some Hollywood-esque excitement to the proceedings, at its root the project is still about creating a lasting record of these dying tongues before their last native speaker is gone. Beyond the conservation aspect, Harrison and Anderson view these archives as keys to further unlocking the mysteries of how language develops. Seed reports:

Harrison and Anderson, both linguists, run the Oregan-based Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, a nonprofit that devotes much of its efforts to building searchable “talking” online dictionaries of rare and endangered languages. By studying these “real outliers,” as Harrison calls them, he says we get incrementally closer to understanding how language itself works.

Anderson says he hopes their documentation efforts will also become a tool to test out linguistic theories. “One of the things that I see myself being able to do,” he explains, “is provide detailed and adequately confirmed phenomena to the general linguistic community and say, ‘here’s some data, now come up with a new theory to explain this data.’”

The Linguists is scheduled to air February 26th on PBS. Watch the trailer below.