Endangered Language Activism

“The Linguists” and Dr. K. David Harrison at Loudoun Campus

The Loudoun Campus will host, “Talk of the Town: A Film Screening of ‘The Linguists’ and Keynote Speaker Dr. K. David Harrison.” The Linguists is an Emmy-nominated documentary produced in 2008 by Ironbound Films.

Event details
Monday, April 14th, 2014.   7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Loudoun Campus, Northern Virginia Community College (1000 Harry Flood Byrd Hwy, Sterling, VA 20164)
Waddell Theatre

This event is free and open to the public (more details here). There will be a question and answer session, book signing, and an Honors Program potluck to follow on the third floor in the LR lobby.

Screened at the Sundance Film Festival, “The Linguists” is a fascinating and compelling look at language extinction and documentation. It follows two linguists, Greg Anderson of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, and Dr. K David Harrison of Swarthmore College as they travel from the Andes Mountains in South America to villages in Siberia, and from English-Hindi boarding schools in Orissa, India, to an American Indian reservation in Arizona.

The film addresses such issues as the spread of major global languages and how they contribute to language extinction, political and social reasons that some languages have been repressed, and reasons that language revitalization and language documentation are important.

In addition to being an anthropologist, Harrison is a National Geographic Fellow and a co-director of the Society’s Enduring Voices Project which documents endangered languages and cultures around the world. He has done extensive fieldwork with indigenous communities from Siberia and Mongolia to Peru, Colombia, India, Nepal and Australia. His work has been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, USA Today and Science and on “The Colbert Report”. He received his doctorate from Yale University and is currently an associate professor at Swarthmore College near Philadelphia.

ImageAnthony Degio (left) listens to playback of a Koro language story, with K. David Harrison, Takpa Yame and Greg Anderson. Photo by Jeremy Fahringer