The Linguists

The Linguists is an independent 2008 American documentary film produced by Ironbound Films about language extinction and language documentation. It follows two linguists, Greg Anderson of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages and David Harrison of Swarthmore College, as they travel around the world to collect recordings of some of the last speakers of several moribund (dying) languages: Chulym in Siberia; Chemehuevi in Arizona, U.S.; Sora in Orissa, India; and Kallawaya in Bolivia.

Production

Seth Kramer, one of the directors, describes how he first got the idea for The Linguists when, in Vilnius, Lithuania, he could not read Yiddish inscriptions on a path in spite of his Jewish heritage. He joined with Daniel A. Miller in 2003 to form Ironbound Films, and received a $520,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to support the film. Later in 2003, the directors chose Anderson and Harrison to be the protagonists of the film. In 2004, director Jeremy Newberger joined the project.