The Importance of Language in the Modern World: Preservation or Suppression of Native Tongues

            In The Linguists, David Harrison and Gregory Anderson travel all over the world in their effort to try to document and preserve languages they believe are at risk of becoming lost forever. It is not uncommon for local dialects to be pushed aside in favor of larger, better known languages; often the result of government measures, some groups chose to abandon their language in order find better opportunities. The suppression of these languages has had negative affects as well as the perceived positives they seemingly bring. Thanks to the work of people like David and Gregory, there is now a more concerned effort to make these languages better known and keep them from being forgotten by future generations.

            The potential loss of these endangered languages is more than just the loss of a method of communication; languages contain stories, customs, memories that if just passed orally and has no written text, could go unremembered. This can be seen in the part of the film where, visiting a remote village in Siberia, a native speaker of the Chulym language recounts a humorous story about moose hunting. Since Chulym has no developed writing system, the only way anyone else would know this story is to hear it being told. The proliferation of boarding schools played a big part in creating this problem. Strict adherence to the language of the set curriculum made it difficult or even impossible to keep their first language memorized. I believe this theme to be one of the most important ones mentioned in the film because, no matter how many changes occur in the course of human history, a inherent respect for our cultures past, present and future must be maintained, including the preservation of our languages. The part of the film that best exemplifies this is the interview with Johnny Hill Jr., the last native speaker of Chemehuevi, one of many dialects of Native American origin. This reminds me of, in another class I took, how we discussed how this impacted Native Americans who went through it as part of the United States’ effort to reacclimatize them into a more  “proper, civilized way of life”.