Babble On, Say Researchers In 'Linguists' Documentary

Researcher Gregory Anderson listens as Don Francisco Ninacondis (with grandson Ariel) speaks Kallawaya, which fewer than 100 people understand. ("The Linguists")

We know what you're thinking. You want to buy a vowel.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

National Geographic is hosting a multi-culti All Roads Film Festival at its headquarters at 17th and M streets NW tonight through Sunday, and "The Linguists" is the opening-night attraction. Its success on the indie circuit is no small accomplishment. Even the film's director, Daniel A. Miller, acknowledges the challenge of dealing with linguists.

"My wife's friend at Berkeley was a linguistics major and we privately called her Data -- as from 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' -- because of her monotone recitation of mostly emotionless observations," he writes in his director's notes.

When the filmmakers first met a young researcher in endangered languages, K. David Harrison, "he seemed like the perfect protagonist. He was as young as we were in 2003 yet looked better on camera. At the same time, he was a bit of a control freak."

His co-researcher, Gregory Anderson, "was Oscar to David's Felix. We found out in time that Greg was a recovering Deadhead, the father of two and both a huge fan of extreme fighting and a black belt. He also spoke close to 20 languages and had founded with David the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages."

Thus does the movie strive to make an adventure out of seeing all the ways the human mind can make sense of the world with language. The trailer's eloquent sell asks who "will circle the planet to hear the last whispers of a dying language, racing against time to hear words rarely spoken before they're never heard again?"

Ask why we care about recording a language that only three people speak, and Harrison replies, "If we were to give a rationale purely for selfish reasons, it would be, after those speakers die, we'll have a scientific record of the language."

But in addition, "science is playing catch-up in many respects to the people who have lived there for thousands of years and know about that ecosystem," says Anderson. "So since all of these ecosystems are under collapse now, it would behoove us to not just throw away this knowledge that people have accrued over the millennia."

And their knowledge doesn't translate out of their language?

"There are approximations that can be made, of course," says Anderson. "Which is why you're capable of reading Dostoevski even if you don't know Russian."

Languages divide as well as unite -- ask Canada. The luxury of embracing global language diversity is palatable in part because the world has succeeded in creating a lingua franca, a universal language -- English. A quarter of the world's population speaks it, according to David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Four or five times as many people speak English as a second language as do those who consider it their first.