Hudson Valley Magazine, November 9, 2007
Tongues untied: Local filmmakers document soon-to-be extinct languages in faraway places

David Levine

There are nearly 7,000 spoken languages in the world. Nearly half of them will be extinct in the next hundred years, language scholars predict. One is lost every two weeks. Before they disappear, two linguists are circling the globe to document these threatened tongues. And a Putnam County production company has been on the road with them, filming their race against time.

Daniel A. Miller, president of Garrison-based Ironbound Films, says he saw an article in the New York Times about lost languages, and it struck a chord. "My grandparents spoke Yiddish, but it was never passed down," he says. "That interested me. What has been lost? It's more than just statistics. The film is about the people who lose the language and the scientists who research it."

His own research led him to Dr. K. David Harrison and Dr. Gregory D.S. Anderson of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, based in Salem, Oregon. Miller and his crew followed them to Siberia in search of a language called Chulym. On the basis of a 20-minute reel — which focused on the researchers' efforts to find the speakers, ingratiate themselves into the community, and coax locals to speak words they had held silent for decades — they convinced the National Science Foundation to put up $500,000 to finish the film, which they titled The Linguists.

The team then traveled far and wide. In Bolivia they tracked down Kallawaya, a language spoken by less than 100 people. In India, it was Sora, a tribal tongue confined to a particular region of the country. And in Arizona, they interviewed a Native American named Johnny Hill, Jr., the last known speaker of Chemeheuvi.

The film focuses on the scientists, Miller says. "The story is about these fallible guys. They become impatient and fearful — they don't know everything and sometimes they didn't know what they were getting into." Such as?

"In India they had to crash a wedding and dance with the locals to convince them to speak the language," he says. "In Siberia, just north of Mongolia, where it's swampland, they were swarmed by these huge mosquitoes. We were constantly swatting the bugs away, which you can hear buzzing on microphones."

But that's nothing compared to Bolivia. The group found a man named Max Churra who spoke Kallawaya, a language dating back to Incan times, which is used mostly by medicine men. Churra performed a healing ceremony in Kallawaya using, among other things, llama fetuses. Then, he sacrificed a live guinea pig. "He tore the animal apart with his bare hands, then lit the whole thing on fire," Miller says, still shaken by the memory. "I was a vegetarian for a while after that."

The Linguists is designed for PBS, and will go on the international film festival circuit this winter in search of wider distribution.