The collaboration between the Tanacross and Northway, Alaska communities and trained linguistic specialists from the Alaska Native Language Center to keep their native language from disappearing. And the continuation of the tangential community effort of preserving their language and culture by teaching and using them at home and in schools and in their lives.
CodeSwitching is a mash-up of personal stories from three generations of African American students who participated in a landmark voluntary desegregation program. Shuttling between their inner-city Boston neighborhoods and predominantly white suburban schools in pursuit of a better education, they find themselves swapping elements of culture, language, and behavior to fit in with their suburban counterparts – Often acting or speaking differently based on their surroundings, called code-switching.
Linguist Indrek Park has been working with Native American languages for over ten years. The film sees him recording the language of the Mandan tribe, who live in the prairies of North Dakota, on the banks of the Missouri River. The job involves a lot of responsibility, and he is running out of time – his language guide, the 84-year-old Edwin Benson, is the last native speaker of Mandan.
This apocalyptic linguistic comedy meditates on the relationship between language, meaning and social decay and is scripted from "double-speak" language found in a variety of media sources. Drawing its title from the Pentagon's term for crash, Involuntary Conversion evokes the hollowness and free-floating anxiety that characterizes late 20th century culture. In a voice that could belong to a hypnotist or a government spokesman, a disembodied speaker recounts a string of events whose common thread is a sense of impending disaster. The mood is suspended somewhere between nightmare and deadpan and is propelled by a narrative as enigmatic as the language it exposes. The iconic shape of a fighter jet floating in a perfect sky has the creepy feel of a video game and the texture of television is used to make the images feel domestically ingrained.
Marc Okrand discusses his involvement with the Star Trek franchise and his work on inventing the Klingon and Vulcan languages.
A man wakes from a coma speaking a fully formed but unrecognizable language baffling linguistic experts from around the globe.
Evan Birch is a family man and esteemed professor at a distinguished university. When a female student goes missing, police Detective Malloy has reason to be suspicious when crucial evidence makes Evan the prime suspect in her disappearance.
What makes a voice “gay”? A breakup with his boyfriend sets journalist David Thorpe on a quest to unravel a linguistic mystery.
The tragic true story of one of the worst cases of child abuse ever documented (in which a girl was locked in a room without social contact for nearly thirteen years) and what happened when she was finally rescued.
Sam decides to stop pursuing charges against her rapist and spend Thanksgiving alone on her family's Virginia farm. Her brother stages an intervention with seven of Sam’s friends to persuade her to return.
From the team behind Man on Wire comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. Following Nim's extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, the film is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal we tried to make human. What we learn about his true nature - and indeed our own - is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.
A series of interviews featuring linguist, philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky done in hand-drawn animation.
Rich in humor and regional color, this sometimes hilarious film uses the prism of language to reveal our attitudes about the way other people speak. From Boston Brahmins to Black Louisiana teenagers, from Texas cowboys to New York professionals, American Tongues elicits funny, perceptive, sometimes shocking, and always telling comments on American English in all its diversity. (PBS)
Taking place after alien crafts land around the world, an expert linguist is recruited by the military to determine whether they come in peace or are a threat.
This award winning film is a fast paced, humorous look at the colorful way the residents of New Orleans express themselves - why they talk the way they do, where the words come from, and what it means to talk with a New Orleans accent.
The Grammar Of Happiness follows the story of Daniel Everett among the extraordinary 'nonconvertible' Amazonian Pirah tribe, a group of indigenous hunter- gatherers whose culture and outlook on life has taken the world of linguistics by storm. As a young ambitious missionary three decades ago, Dan, a red-bearded towering American, decamped to the Amazon rain forest to save indigenous souls. His assignment was to translate the book of Mark into the tongue of the Pirah, a people whose puzzling speech seemed unrelated to any other on Earth. What he learned during his time with the Pirah led him to question the very foundations of his own deep beliefs. As a 'born again' atheist, Dan divorced his devout Christian wife and became estranged from his children. Having lost faith and family, his new life is dominated by the desire to leave behind his legacy. Everett's most controversial claim is that the Pirah language lacks 'recursion' - the ability to build an infinite number of sentences.
This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse: This lecture takes its name from a line in John Keats' poem, "On the Grasshopper and Cricket". Bernstein does not discuss Keats' poem directly in this chapter, but he provides his own definition of the poetry of earth, which is tonality. Tonality is the poetry of earth because of the phonological universals discussed in lecture 1. This lecture discusses predominantly Stravinsky, whom Bernstein considers the poet of earth.
This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse: Lecture 5 picks up at the early twentieth century with an oncoming crisis in Western Music. As these lectures have traced the gradual increase and oversaturation of ambiguity, Bernstein now designates a point in history that took ambiguity too far.
This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse: Bernstein provides two distinct meanings of the term ambiguity. The first is "doubtful or uncertain" and the second, "capable of being understood in two or more possible senses"
This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse:Semantics is the study of meaning in language, and Bernstein's third lecture, "musical semantics", accordingly, is Bernstein's first attempt to explain meaning in music. Although Bernstein defines musical semantics as "meaning, both musical and extramusical" this lecture focuses exclusively on the "musical" version of meaning.