Content
The film begins with the fact that a large proportion of the world's languages (half, out of a total of 7,000, according to the film) are going extinct. The film's two protagonists, Anderson and Harrison, set out both to gather recordings of several endangered languages in order to document these languages later, and to educate viewers about the current rate of language extinction. In the process, they travel to the Andes mountains in South America, to villages in Siberia, to English-Hindi boarding schools in Orissa, India, and to an American Indian reservation in Arizona.
The film addresses issues including the spread of major global languages and how they contribute to language extinction; political and social reasons that some languages have been repressed; and reasons that language revitalization and language documentation are important (including both maintaining a scientific record of that language, and preserving unique local knowledge and history that is only carried in the local language).
Read more about this topic: The Linguists
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