The Linguists

On a mission to document and record some of the world's most endangered languages, Gregory Anderson and David Harrison traveled to a handful of locations in the film, The Linguists. They set out to study areas with a history of colonization where indigenous languages had been suppressed and discouraged by outsiders. To see a map highlighting areas where languages are in great danger, click here.

During their journey, Gregory and David were able to gather information on four languages: Chemehuevi, Kallawaya, Chulym and Sora, languages from Arizona, Bolivia, Siberia and India respectively. In Bolivia, the two seemed to have luck on their side when they discovered a native speaker of Kallawaya by chance. Max Chura Mamani, a traditional Bolivian healer, allowed Gregory and David to be a part of a ritual, which he performed strictly in Kallawaya. To find out more about Max and the other speakers featured in the film, visit this site. Unlike many languages, Kallawaya is not a language spoken to children from birth. It is a language reserved for the Kallawaya healers and is passed on from adult males to teenage males as a means of transmitting the sacred medicinal knowledge the healers possess.

While I have a great amount of respect for how the speakers of Kallawaya choose to preserve their language and their customs, the disheartening fact that fewer than 100 speakers of Kallawaya remain is hard to ignore. Should the Kallawaya tradition of teaching the language solely to apprentice healers be challenged and changed as a means to save the language from extinction? Would the language still be sacred if everyone was allowed to learn it and speak it? These are some of the tough questions linguists like Gregory and David must ask themselves while conducting their research. Whose responsibility is it to decide if languages should be saved while culture is dismissed or if culture should be respected even if it means language is lost as a consequence?