The linguists

                   After watching “The Linguists”, I felt that one of the themes presented was the fact that many of the people they were able to find that had languages that were “endangered” seemed to only live in people that were very old. In a sense as these people die, the language dies off with them. Within the different regions they explored looking for these rare dialects, there wasn’t one single example of a youth speaking the language. The only somewhat young man was the driver who spoke Chulym fluently. I feel like you see this lot in our times, where more young people tend to gravitate to the most contemporary form of their language, and English. There is less emphasis on the history and culture that resides within these languages and that was also depicted as the film showed. It was interesting to see the faces of these people that spoke and it almost seemed like they were documenting a piece of history. I remember learning that many of these languages don’t have any written form and that is another factor that makes the languages harder to preserve, or even document that they ever existed.(should video or audio not be an option. With any of the languages shown and in almost all languages widely used or not, I find a strong sense of pride connected to it. I know for myself, I feel a great pride in being able to sign and I think ASL is so beautiful. I know many people follow in that same sentiment about their own languages,  perhaps fueling the desire to explore and try to maintain or at least document as many as possible before they perish. Its actually quite amazing the depths to which these men went to explore, and I found it humorous how drunk they got to respect the culture and to obtain what they needed for the film. I enjoyed it all very much (minus the animal sacrifice, even in fast forward)