The Linguists

The Linguists was a movie that introduced various endangered languages around the world. Here is a website by SIL regarding language loss. Gregory and David traveled to these different countries to examine the speakers and document the ways in which language is altered from place to place. I have never heard of these endangered languages before, but I was interested to learn about who still spoke each dialect.

As they traveled to places like India, Siberia, Arizona, and Bolivia, they discovered that it wouldn’t be as easy to record information about the speakers as they once thought. Chulym was the least documented language in Siberia. They encountered the first speaker that has lived there since 1961 and could barely hear what they were saying. The second speaker altered between shouting, cursing, and loving them. Lastly, the third speaker was in her 90’s and was almost completely deaf, but she spoke perfect Chulym. They stated that people often deny their language and then later speak it.

In India, children were sent to boarding schools and forbidden to speak their own language. This, in turn, was a disaster for endangered languages. In Arizona, the Native Indian language was forbidden and they stated that language is your identity and culture so if your language was lost, so were you. The Sora language has only 300,000 speakers and the Kallawaya language has under 100 speakers. Nobody learns it at birth, instead it passes from adult males to teenage males. There was only 9 speakers of Chulym in Siberia and by 2008, 4 of them had died. It saddens me to learn how these endangered languages are decreasing in speakers day by day. Many people give up their languages for economic benefits and not because they want to. It was interesting for me to learn the different cultures as they traveled to these countries, as well as the languages being spoken and by whom.