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.

It took three years to film The Linguists, and during this time over 200 hours of film were collected. During this time, the cast and crew travelled to numerous remote areas that one reporter describes as godforsaken, and coped with physical ailments such as altitude sickness Newberger has recounted that they coped with altitude sickness in the Andes by drinkingcups a day of tea made from coca leaves, one of the main ingredients in the psychoactive drug cocaine.The film begins with the fact that a large proportion of the worlds languages half, out of a total of 7,000, according to the film are going extinct. The films two protagonists, Anderson and Harrison, set out both to gather recordings of several endangered languages in order to document these languages later, and to educate viewers about the current rate of language extinction. In the process, they travel to the Andes mountains in South America, to villages in Siberia, to EnglishHindi boarding schools in Orissa, India, and to an American Indian reservation in Arizona. ........

Source: Wikipedia