Film captures two ethnographers circling the world to record endangered languages.

The film The Linguists, which was shown at Sundance, will be aired on public television in the United States on February 26, 2009. Funded in part by the National Science Foundation, the film chronicles the work of David Harrison of Swarthmore College and Gregory Anderson of the Living Tongues Institute as they traveled around the world to record languages that are in danger of disappearing.



Interviewed this morning on NPR, the pair of language specialists speak 25 languages together. But they are most interested in the languages that may be gone by tomorrow. The movie promises to be an interesting watch.

If you do not have access to US public television, or your station is not broadcasting the film (mine is showing it at 2:00 AM — thank heaven for TiVo), you might want to order the dvd from the film’s website.