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")

"The Linguists" visits a boarding school in India where parents eagerly send their kids to learn a way to make a living -- running a sewing machine, for example. These kids speak 60 home languages, but as often as not they are taught in English because, the film acknowledges with some rue, it is the most efficient way to give them a good education.

If these parents are more concerned with their kids' economic futures than they are with the preservation of their tribal languages, what's wrong with that?

"English won the competition for languages," says Anderson. "The English-first laws are all inane because it's a fait accompli." And all those other languages he records? "We serve the heritage communities of these languages," he says.

"There's really a global movement going on right now for language revitalization," says Harrison. "A lot of it looks dire and depressing and the trend is downward, but people have realized that they were presented with a false choice: that they had to give up their identity, give up their language, become part of a homogenized melting-pot culture. People are pulling back from that and reasserting their roots, their ethnic identity, their multiple identities, their heritage languages and affiliations.

"There's a better attitude nowadays where people don't just pay lip service to the idea of diversity, but they understand that diversity does actually strengthen a society, strengthens us intellectually, strengthens us socially."

Weren't things better before the Tower of Babel?

"I was raised in a religious tradition that views multilingualism as quite literally a punishment from God," says Harrison. "It was intended to 'confound' -- that was the exact word that was used. But there are alternative mythologies. There are still societies today" -- in New Guinea and South America -- "that actually require their members to marry a person who is a speaker of a different language. Diversity has a survival value."

"Yeah," chimes in Anderson, "they call it hybrid vigor in biology."

H. Russell Bernard is a grand old man of endangered-language research, having devoted four decades to it. The chairman emeritus of the University of Florida anthropology department and the former editor in chief of the American Anthropologist takes the long view about disappearing language diversity.

"We're conducting this experiment where we had 35,000 years of language proliferation. About 500 years ago it started contracting, since the age of discovery and conquest and colonialism. We know that the proliferation of languages was the natural order of things for a very long time. Modern Homo sapiens is conducting an experiment to reduce that, to maybe one. It's hubris, but why shouldn't we do that -- translate it all into one?

"If I had 20 to 30 planets on which to conduct this experiment, in which some proliferate and some stay the same, and I could monitor it for 2,000 or 3,000 years, and could tell what the consequences were, I would not be so concerned about whether the experiment we're conducting is good or bad for humankind.

"Without that comparison," however, Bernard says, experimenting in language extinction "seems to me utterly reckless."

Meanwhile, you ask Anderson and Harrison whether they realize they are causing their National Geographic publicist to pound her head against her desk.

What a great opportunity, she thought. Language diversity! She promptly started to line up interviews with Spanish-language media. That's when she learned that of the 25 languages the two could speak, none of those was Spanish.

Twenty-five languages and none of them is Spanish? you say to the boys, incredulously. Aren't you ashamed?

"Yeah, I know," says Anderson.

"We're terrible."