THE LINGUISTS
Directed by Seth kramer, Daniel Miller & Jeremy Newberger
United States, 65 Minutes, with Subtitles
Documentary/Foreign
THU APR 23, 7:00pm
SUN APR 26, 7:30pm **Please Note Addition From Festival Guide**
Filmmaker Gregory Anderson in attendance
Film Hosted by Tea Party Bookshop
A two-man mission to document the world's endangered languages becomes a fleet-footed study of human communication and its limitless structural and functional possibilities in this documentary from directors Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy Newberger. Based on the alarming reality that a language goes extinct every two weeks, this involving travelogue sheds light on how smaller native communities and their systems of communication are often marginalized by the dominant cultures around them. The founders of Salem’s Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, who speak a combined total of 25 languages, locate seven surviving speakers of Chulym in Siberia, interact with speakers of the Sora tongue in tribal India and track down the few Bolivians fluent in Kallawaya, an unusual language linked to healing rites. The film is enhanced with insights about the many uses and varieties of human communication.
Filmography: First Feature
Gregory Anderson (Linguist)
Director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, a non-profit organization dedicated to the documentation, revitalization, and maintenance of endangered languages. He specializes in the languages of Siberia. He has degrees in Linguistics from Harvard (A. B. 1989) and the University of Chicago (PhD 2000), and has conducted extensive fieldwork into the languages of the Altai Sayan group. Greg has done fieldwork in Nigeria on Eleme, in India on the Munda languages, in Bolivia on Kallawaya, and in Oregon on Siletz Dee-Ni. He has published widely in the fields of historical linguistics, descriptive grammar, morphology, verb typology, and the linguistics of Munda, Salishan, and Ogonoid languages.
