Voices en Español

There are an estimated 7,000 languages in the world today. Half of them will be gone by the dawn of the next century. Every two weeks a language falls into disuse, never to be heard of again, as its last remaining speaker passes away.

The Linguists is a documentary about the effort of David Harrison and Greg Anderson to track down and record samples of three of these languages which are on the verge of extinction. The film follows the two scholars as they crisscross the globe traveling to Bolivia, India and Siberia.

I have not seen the film but it has been receiving rave reviews and it was well received at this year’s Sundance, the most important film festival in the U.S. Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times’ film critic, called the documentary a “fascinating journey with two men who are the Indiana Joneses of language hunters, academics who go to obscure corners of the globe to find and preserve disappearing languages.”

The documentary is the brainchild of Seth Kramer, the director of the film. Kramer said in an interview that it was his personal background that give me him the idea for the movie. He is among the first generation of his family to neither speak nor understand Yiddish, and so he says he has been fascinated for years by languages with dwindling populations of speakers.

When the Linguists crew goes to Siberia to track down speakers of Chulym, they have a hard time at first. The handful of Chulym speakers they do find are very old and practically deaf. When it seems like David and Greg are about to hit a dead-end, fortune smiles on them. It turns out that the man they have hired to drive them around, a local middle-aged man by the name of Vasya Gabov, is a native Chulym speaker.

Vasya was initially reluctant to admit that Chulym was his native language when he met the two American scholars but he eventually opens up to them. As a boy he had invented his own way to write Chulym using Cyrillic letters, since Chulym does not have a written form. He kept a paper and pencil hidden away in the woods and would document what was going on in his life. It was basically a diary. But one day Vasya showed his collection of pages to a Russian speaker who took one look and then told Vasya that what he had written was “offensive.” Upset by the criticism, Vasya told the filmmakers that he felt ashamed and stopped writing after that. But by the end of the documentary, Vasya has penned a new story, this time a Chulym folk tale, and the filmmakers promise to help him get it published. If they do, it will be the first ever children’s book written in Chulym.

You can find more about The Linguists documentary on its web site and can read some of the reviews and articles about the project here. There are numerous screenings scheduled in the U.S. and Europe for the remainder of the year.