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
Famous quotes containing the word content:
“Know how to be content and you will never be disgraced; practice self-restraint and you will never be in danger.”
—Chinese proverb.
Laozi.
“We can’t forever be spending our lives paying for political follies that never gave us anything but always took from us, and I am content with the narrowest metes and bounds provided I have peace and quiet for work.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)