The Linguists

How long does it take for a language to die? A hundred years? Two hundred? A thousand? It takes one generation.

Somewhere, some staggering statistic can tell us, roughly, how many species on this planet disappear every minute, or day, or month. Because we understand that each extinction silences a unique biological voice--information about the world and life that we can never recover, never study, never account for--we all justifiably campaign for that voice's survival. We fear and fight to prevent these deaths. Once we lose the last plant or animal of a species, its particular cosmic memory, so necessary and so irreplaceable, vanishes. Not even a vestige remains. When a species goes extinct, it immolates. Life unremembers it.

The massive SIL database, which is a sort of storehouse for global classifications of languages, estimates the total number of Earth's active languages to be just shy of seven thousand. (This number does not include moribund languages like Latin or Sanskrit--languages that persist culturally and textually but that lack native speakers. No one learns Latin as a first language.) Linguists predict that approximately sixty-five to eighty percent of these languages will go extinct in the next hundred years. And that is the conservative projection.

Language death is a neglected, but terribly important, field of study. During the first half of the twentieth century, as the fledgling American science began to bloom, linguists such as Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, recognizing the imminent loss of hundreds of Native American languages, instituted a massive documentary effort to locate and transcribe these precious human resources. As late as the 1960s, when a graduate school interviewed one of its prospects, it would require the student to spend six months in a "field study"--going to an obscure, usually rural and certainly third-world backwater, assimilating its culture, and documenting the language, building its grammar from scratch: every vowel and tone accent, every verb, every infuriating nuance. We don't do this anymore. Today, Anglo-American linguistics concerns itself less with indigenous peoples and more with quasi-philosophical and mathematical models for linguistic cognition: language as a kind of computation or logic. Why hurry to document dying languages when human minds, whatever language they process, all operate the same hardware?

The Linguists is a throwback to those times when the word-scientists, risking health and home and even, occasionally, life and limb, ventured into the godawful swamps and savannas of this dictatorship or that civil war-fueled puppet state in order to meet some very old, toothless peasants, shake their hands, and then sit very still for hours, patiently sketching every dribbling consonant and stress cue. Greg Anderson and David Harrison, the "stars" of this movie, speak twenty-five languages between them--Urdu, Norwegian, Russian, god knows what else. Their ambition is to apply their skill in acquiring and explaining languages to recording endangered specimens. A camera follows them as they trek to Siberia, Bolivia, and Orissa (in India) in hopes of finding communities of speakers whom they can interview and whose languages they can document. But, as Anderson notes, their interest is not merely academic. Among other things, a language enables its speakers to access historical or mythic memory, the vast cultural experience of those who preceded us, their knowledge that, even now, gives context and clarity to the thinking confusion of our lives. Without language, an ethnic group, a town, or an individual is utterly uncreated, forced to exist in an arbitrary, impersonal space with no past and no future. When a language dies, its culture dies too--every thought, song, answer, question, insult, emotion, everything. Your people have no past. They never existed. Saving languages is more than just an academic curiosity; it bestows on its subjects a curatorial grace and dignity; its affection amplifies their place and power in the world, letting them speak for themselves, urging them to endure, to remember, and to rage.

Anderson and Harrison make a genial pair, in the dryly virginal way that Dungeons and Dragons players or chess recluses do. They're bookworms, and they know it. Harrison even has the self-awareness to admit that his childhood interest in languages was "irrational" (read: girl-repellent). But each has his awkward, never-got-laid-in-high-school, shuffly charm, and unlike other notable duos (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Goofus and Gallant, the insufferable chicks from Ghost World) they know themselves well enough to realize when to speak, when to shut up, and when to sleep. They never pester us, each other, or their assets. And each scholar does his own thing. Anderson and Harrison are sufficiently dissimilar men with sufficiently dissimilar interests--one likes sounds and living with the natives, the other enjoys verbs and the comforts of running water, mosquito-nets, and no AIDS--that they remain pleasantly distinct and personable even while they merge their considerable talents.

Now, because I have an obvious bias--my own background is in philology--I can't speak to the film's attractiveness. I naturally find the content fascinating. But I can say that the movie keeps its focus on the people, their situations, and the profound ethical and ecological implications of language death, including, as Anderson complains, the horrid complacency that persuades us to write that ten-thousandth dissertation on Milton or develop that already-obsolete-by-release computer operating system or smaller, more gadgety dildo-phone, when, in your lifetime, another ten or twenty or two hundred languages perish. These men have a real moral interest in and commitment to what they do; they're secular missionaries, curators, place-preservers. The film wisely eschews esoteric chats on nasal-obstruent clusters, opting instead to emphasize the grainy human aspect. And the story, such as it is, manages more than one friendly moment. On the Andean slopes, for example, in the South American twilight, Harrison gets violently ill. Locals convince him to drink an illicit brew concocted from funky green leaves and what I can only guess is some kind of Bolivian magic dirt.

At a scant fifty-six minutes, The Linguists feels more like a pilot for a promising miniseries than an actual movie. Its materials--sociological, anthropological, ecological, and, of course, linguistic--surface and submerge in a continuous, maddening swirl of what-the-fuck brilliance and fuck-it-all frustration. When Anderson and Harrison travel to Russia to record Chulym, a remote Siberian language threatened by extinction, they discover that its speakers translate the English sentence "I went out to go moose-hunting" using only one word. As Harrison, the syntactician, explains, had this language died, leaving us with only Chinese, French, and English, or whatever, we would conclude, by inference, that all languages require their constituents to make meaningful sense by combining smaller elements into larger ones. So, in English, we take the various heads of phrases, develop them into full phrases, and coordinate those phrases to express the meaning of the sentence. Chulym can get by with just the one word. Its ability to articulate sentence-level meaning on the level of individual words tell us that human language is much more diverse and difficult than we assumed.

But as it does with its other compelling facts, the movie isolates the anecdote, skates on it like a blade on ice, tracing elegant designs, and then moves on to an unrelated, equally undeveloped insight. The structure, if it has one, acts as a serious flaw and a cumbersome restriction. But the movie itself is defiantly not shallow; its casual flight among facts is imposed by the inappropriate running time. The film's concern is so immensely dense and so ceaselessly riveting, it can only suffer for being less than an hour. None of the intellectual strands has the space it needs to be unraveled. Every ten minutes deserves its own sixty-minute episode. In order to work properly as a film, The Linguists needs to be at least three hours longer. When I read that the director collected over two hundred hours of footage, amputated to the unsatisfying, deficit-laden hump that it is, I nearly exploded out of my ape-body and became a person. TWO HUNDRED HOURS?! And we get fifty-six minutes?? It's not an infomercial, you dick. Tell the story like a professional.

So, although the movie scores points for originality and allure, it sort of flunks on competence. Watching it is like reading a very provocative but exhaustible and ultimately upsetting transcript of a conversation about the mysteries of the universe as discussed by The Two Most Enlightened Beings on Earth, except that they both have ADD and can't stay on topic for more than a few seconds. Every sentence lights a fire in some trashcan in your brain, but the two professors run amok in there--pyromaniacs with nervous disorders--and after twenty minutes your entire head is in flames. The fires are too often and too many to put out, and there's nothing to do but resign yourself to a lifetime of thundering ash. B-