Linguistically Significant Films

Date:17-May-2005From:Michael Barrie Subject:Linguistically Significant Filmshttps://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1639.html

I have received such a large number of replies to my query onlinguistically significant films that I have categorized them as shownbelow. Thank-you to all who replied. I have also incorporated the resultsof the earlier list(http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/linguist/issues/7/7-1708.html) so as to createone large master list. If a film fits into more than one category, it islisted in all relevant categories. Many films were mentioned merely becauseof the language the film is in. For example, Atanarjuat was offered becausethe enitre film is in Inuktitut. Clearly, I cannot list every film thathappens to be in some language or other, but films in Inuktitut are few andfar between, so I created a category ''Films in uncommonly screenedlanguages''. Some people gave lots of information about the film inquestion...others a very brief mention. The information compiled belowreflects this. If anyone wants more information on a particular film, Isuggest going tohttp://www.imdb.comto find out more. Finally, I havedecided to edit out extremely little. Thus a film's inclusion on this listmay seem dubious to some; however, I leave that for the reader to decide.

0. Other sources

Sum: Films and Documentaries on Endangered Languageshttp://www.linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1562.html

Website for a course on Language and Popular Culture (contains link to filmresources)http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/popcult/syllabus.html

1. Fiction

1.1 Interesting characters/careers related to linguistics

Chan is Missing (directed by Wayne Wang), 1982 has a sociolinguistcharacter based loosely on Deborah Tannen.

There's a ''star Trek TNG episode with a deaf character who uses telepathywith 3 different people who ''interpret'' for him. When they all die, Datalearns ASL in record time.

C.J.Cherryh's ''Foreigner'' series, the fate of two species depends on atranslator/diplomat. Bilingualism and a solid grasp of grammar play animportant role in this series.

Nell 1994 Michael Apted. A young girl has grown up in isolation with hermother, who is speechless as the result of a stroke. After the death of themother, she is forced to encounter the outside world, where a cold-heartedpsyhologist is more interested in studying the language-deprived Nell thanin helping her. Starring Jodie Foster.

Clear & Present Danger (1994) - forensic linguistics

The Fugitive (1993) - forensic linguistics & speech recognition

Ball of Fire 1941 Howard Hawks. A lexicographer (Gary Cooper) realisingthat the slang section of his dictionary is outdated visits a nightclub inorder to update it. It turns out that the nightclub singer is engaged to agangster on the run from the police.

The exorcist 1973 William Friedkin. This horror classic features linguistsfrom the Georgetown University linguistics department decoding a messagefrom the devil by playing a tape backwards. In reverse, the devilapparently speaks standard American English.

Barwy ochronne (Camouflage) 1977 Krzysztof Zanussi. A Polish film in whichthe action revolves around a linguistics summer school.

Iceman 1984 Fred Schepisi. A neandertal man is found frozen into ice, isdefrosted, and found to be alive and kicking. His guttural growls aredeciphered by an ''MIT linguist'', aided by a ''Pitch-Stress Meter''.

1.2 Interesting/unlikely/bizarre linguistic phenomena

There's a ''star Trek TNG episode with a deaf character who uses telepathywith 3 different people who ''interpret'' for him. When they all die, Datalearns ASL in record time.

''Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'',has the concept of the Babelfish,which goes in your ear and ''translates'' - book, TV series, radio series,and film.

Lost in Translation (2004) - linguistic contact

_Kukushka_ (_The Cuckoo_) (2002), directed by Aleksandr Rogozhkin. It'sabout three people, a Finn, a Saami, & a Russian, thrown together duringWWII with no lingua franca among them

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - wordplay abounds and is sometimesanactual game on screen

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. 1999. Director/Writer: Jim Jarmusch.(French/English miscommunication)

''Nirgendwo in Afrika'' (Nowhere in Africa). It has nice illustrations ofbilingualism/multilingualism, code-switching, and child L2 acquisition.

A movie with Alan Arkin called Slums of Beverly Hills has a made-uplanguage, game language, used by the two female leads.

My Cousin Vinny in intro classes. Working class NY ''lawyer'' [Joe Pesci]defends his road tripping cousin in a court of law in Georgia. Famous forthe expression ''the two yoots (youths)''. Dialects in contact, you couldcall it.

Sneakers 1992 Phil Alden Robinson. The film is about cryptography, but alsofeatures an intriguing use of speaker identification. Cast includes RobertRedford, Sidney Poitier, Dan Aykroyd and River Phoenix.

===(taken from posting on Language Endagerment)Endangered Languages, language endangerment or revitalization. I am awareof two such productions: ''Vanishing Voices'' on Chulym (Turkic) byAmerican PBS and ''De lste lden fan in taal'' (''The last sounds of alanguage'') by Frisian Television, also on Siberian lgs, I believe.===(http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1441.html)

El Norte. 1983. director: Gregory Nava.(English, Spanish, and Maya used by Guatemalan immigrants exhibit thesociolinguistic complexity of their predicament)

The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez. 1982. director: Robert M. Young.(languages in contact issue. It shows how the mistranslation of a word byan interpreter causes a man to be sent to jail.)

Princess Caraboo. 1994. director: Michael Austin.(language creation)

Nell (1994) - woman grows up with impoverished language and is then foundand taught

Birth of a Nation (1982; 1997) - lip reading

Look who's Talking (1989) - very early language acquisition

Name of the Rose (2003) - code switching

Love Actually (2003) - Advanced L2 acquisition in 1 week

Born to Be Wild 1995 John Gray. One of the two main characters is a gorillanamed Katie who is being taught sign language.

2001 (1968) - HAL understands Natural Language

The Private life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) - parasol code language

Stargate. 1994. director: Roland Emmerich.(historical linguistics, AncientEgyptian?)

Pygmalion/My Fair Lady 1937 /38/64 various. George Bernhard Shaw'sPygmalion is familiar to most people.

The phonetician Henry Higgins (played by Leslie Howard in the 1938version), one of the two main characters, is modelled on real-life linguistHenry Sweet. The Dutch film version came in 1937, followed by an Englishone the year after. The musical version ''My Fair Lady'' was filmed in 1964with Audrey Hepburn as Eliza.

The Miracle Worker 1962 Arthur Penn. Depicts Helen Keller's acquisition oftactile sign language.

L'enfant Sauvage (The Wild Child) 1969 Francois Truffaut. The true storyabout Victor, the language-deprived child found in south-western France inthe late 18th century.

Jeder fr sich und Gott gegen alle (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser) 1974Werner Herzog. Based on the true story of the boy found in Nuremberg in theearly 19th century. Kaspar Hauser is known as one of the few feral childrenwho actually did learn to speak.

Grand Illusion. 1937. director: Jean Renoir.(use of French, German, and English as a marker of social standing amongWWI prisoners of war)

The Jennie Project 2001 Gary Nadeau. Two anthropologists adopt a chimp,raise it with their own children, and teach it American Sign Language.

Windtalkers 2002 John Woo. A dramatised version of the actual use of Navahoas a secret radio code during

World War II Pacific operations. Starring Nicholas Cage.

Enemy Mine. 1985. director: Wolfgang Petersen.(sci-fi film with alien language acquisition)

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. 1985. director: George Miller.(includes a creole spoken by children)

Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. 1984.director: Hugh Hudson. (ape-man acquires language in record time)

Bladerunner. 1982. director: Ridley Scott.(evidence of a futuristic linguafranca)

Star Trek:TNG ''Darmok'' episode 102. 1991.(alien language based upon metaphor and analogy)

Quest for Fire. 1981. director: Jean-Jacques Annaud.(early human language)

A Great Wall. 1986. director: Peter Wang.(cross-cultural communication in China)

A Clockwork Orange. 1971. director: Stanley Kubrick.(language change)

1.3 Films in Uncommonly screened languages or many languages

''Beyond Silence'', a German film that contains DGS (German Sign Language)

Atanarjuat - Film in Inuktitut about the lives of the Inuit before Europeancontact.

Lord of the Rings - it is said that Tolkien created Middle Earth just toexplore and create new languages

Land of the Lost TV series - learning the fictional Paku language

Night on Earth. 1991. Director/Writer: Jim Jarmusch. (episodes in English,German Pidgin English, French, Italian, and Finnish)

Kill Bill. Vol 1/2. 2003/2004. Director: Quentin Tarantino. (The Bridespeaks English, Japanese, and Chinese [Mandarin and a bit of Cantonese -The use of Cantonese in the film is to parody the low-budget kung-fu filmsfrom Hong Kong])

''Nu Shu: A Hidden Langauge of Women in China''. It is about a secretwriting system used only by women in the Hunan province. Here is a link toa distributor if you want to add that info. to your list. The distributorhas three other films that they categorize under ''language/linguistics''if you do a search.

I haven't seen any of them and so can't say whether or not they are mainlyabout language or not.http://www.wmm.com/catalog/pages/c473.htm

Time of the Gypsies Dom za vesanje (1988) Directed by Emir Kusturica.Bosnia This may be the only movie ever to be shown with subtitles in everycountry it ever played in. A bit melodramatic, but I would be hard pressedto find another movie where all the characters spoke Romani.http://imdb.com/title/tt0097223

The Missing (2003) (in which characters speak a dialect of Apache)http://www.cnn.com/2003/EDUCATION/12/16/native.speakers.ap/

The Interpreter features a made-up African language based on Shone andSwahili, created by an African linguist in London.

Daughters of the Dust. 1992. director: Julie Dash. (film with lots ofGullah, spoken on Dafauskie Island on the Georgia coast.)

The Last of the Mohicans (1992) - now extinct [Iroquoian] language spoken

The Passion of Christ (2004) - dead languages

Trainspotting - endangered language and rude words

4 weddings & a funeral (1994) - sign language

Dances with Wolves (with Kevin Kostner) - film about a European explorerwho learns Dakota.

El Norte. 1983. director: Gregory Nava.(English, Spanish, and Maya used by Guatemalan immigrants exhibit thesociolinguistic complexity of their predicament)

Children of a Lesser God. 1986. director: Randa Haines. (ASL and lip reading)

The Gods Must be Crazy. 1981. director: Jamie Uys. (language with clicks)

Black Robe. 1991. director: Bruce Beresford. (Algonquian language in the17th or 18th century)

The Harder they Come. 1973. director: Perry Henzell. (lots of Jamaican creole)

Picture Bride. 1994. director: Kayo Hatta.(dialogue mostly Hawaiian plantation pidgin. some discussion oflexical differences)

1.4 Accents and Idiolectal phenomena

Lord of the Rings trilogy for overall language design - but particularlyfor the Gollum character's

language variety - hobbitses etc.

Renee Zellweger in the Bridget Jones films

Gwyneth Paltrow in Sliding Doors

Kate Winslet in Holy Smoke (brilliant Australian accent)

Annette Bening in Being Julia (stunning 30's RP accent).

Mary Poppins (1964) - bad cockney

Pygmalion. 1938. director: Anthony Asquith. (film adaptation of G. B. Shawplay about phonetician's relationship with dialect modification)

My Fair Lady. 1964. director: George Cukor. (musical version of Pygmalion)

Singing in the Rain. 1952. director: Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen.(dialect modification and phonetics)

Riff Raff (1990) directed by Ken Loach. UK This film about a group ofconstruction workers features working class dialects. What was significantabout the film is that it had English language subtitles for Englishspeaking audiences.http://imdb.com/title/tt0100491/.

Six Degrees of Separation (1993) directed by Fred Schepisis. US A retellingof Pygmalion in a contemporary NYC setting. Worth noticing for theforegrounding of class and language.http://imdb.com/title/tt0108149

Road Scholar (1993) directed by Roger Weisberg. US Poet and NPR commentatortakes a road trip across the US shortly after getting his driver's licenseafter being a pedestrian for twenty years. Language and region areforegrounded. Also features some American language and culture.http://imdb.com/title/tt0107974

My Cousin Vinnie turns on a linguistic phenomenon. In New York speech, asarcastic statement can be made in a flat intonation ''yeah, I'm the bankrobber'' (read: ''yeah, I'm the bank robber, like the pope is Hindu'') butis interpreted unsarcastically, in this movie (by non-New Yorkers, perhapsunfamiliar with this style) as a confession. It's a great example ofregional differences (or simply how intonation can be ambiguous, and leadto opposite claims, like the sentence ''I can't recommend her highlyenough'' (from Fromkin Rodman &Hyams).

''THE APOSTLE'' starring Charles Duvall: Samples of revival preachingregister in deep South (Texas, Louisiana) as well as very authentic samplesof deep South SWVE and AAVE. Also, ''Bullsworth'' a White politiciantrying to act and ''sound'' Black an attempt to curry Black votes.

Code 46, with Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton. All the characters speak inthis language that is mostly English but freely code-switches with Spanish(primarily), French, Arabic and Chinese.

'Black and White', a 'based on a true story' Australian flim featuring astoryline where the defence argues that a 'confession' presented to thecourt in Standard Autralian English shouldn't be admitted as it was highlyunlikely that this was an accurate representaion of what the Aborignialdefendant could have produced. It even features the linguist Strehlow (bigname in early Australian linguistics, and anthropology) as an expertwitness.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299547/

South Park, The Movie (1997) - Canadian diphthong (monopthongised);sociolinguistics of taboo words

A Thousand Clowns 1965 Fred Coe. Includes a dialect identificationWunderkind (''Upper East Side, but you spent a couple of years in Chicago'').

Conceiving Ada 1997 Lynn Hershman-Leeson. A computer genius manages tocommunicate with the dead, and reaches Ada Lovelace, a forerunner of sortsfor computational linguistics.

1.5 Other (humour, etc)

Monty Python: Life of Brian. John Cleese as Roman Officer explains Latingrammar.

Carry on X-ing (varied)- double entendre

Trainspotting - endangered language and rude words

Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) - no speech, all song

Star Trek films (1993;1996, etc) - linguist (Mark Okrand) hired to createKlingon

Being John Malkovich (1999) - one word language

South Park, The Movie (1997) - Canadian diphthong (monopthongised);sociolinguistics of taboo words

The Private life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) - parasol code language

Robinson Crusoe on Mars. 1964. director: Byron Haskin.(language teaching toan alien)

The Statue 1971 Rodney Amateau. British linguist wins the Nobel prize forhaving invented a universal

language (how come there is no such prize in real life?). His wife iscommisioned to sculpt a statue of him, but she makes it more endowed thanher linguist husband actually is.

Het Dak van de Walvis (On Top of the Whale) 1982 Raoul Ruiz. Parody of muchof western academia. A group of field linguists set out to study an exoticlanguage which consists only of one single word, which therefore meanseverything.

Sherman's March 1986 Ross McElwee. Features the hippie linguist Winnie,from whose mouth we have the following memorable quote: ''I've told youthat for a very long time, I've believed that the only important things inlife are linguistics and sex. So it's easy to see how one would getinvolved with a linguistics professor''.

Stargate 1994 Roland Emmerich. American soldiers (led by Kurt Russell) andan Egyptologist are transported to a far-away planet from where they havedifficulties getting home. Fortunately, a thorough knowledge ofhieroglyphics proves useful.

1.6 Novels

_Babel 17_, Sameul Delaney An alien race plans a takeover of humanity viacorrupting language. Linguist hero must discover the plot. (Delaney's_Neveryona_ books also have some interesting stuff on how language,metaphor and symbolism might develop in early civilisation.)

_The Embedding_, Ian Watson Linguist hero is exploring language embeddingprocesses. Aliens make contact with Earth, communicate using the principlesof Universal Grammar and propose trade of information,involving findingunusual thought-language processes. (Actually a highly ironic and bleak tale.)

_Snowcrash_, Neal Stephenson A language-is-a-virus theme, set in acyberpunk future where computer viruses invade the mind.

_The Dispossessed_, Ursula Le Guin Set in twin worlds with contrastingsocieties, one a carefully balanced, austere egalitarian collective, theother a rigid, extravagant, hierarchical oligarchy, with languagesreflecting/reflected by the social organisation. (Le Guin's _Earthsea_books are also interesting, using the language-is-power theme for theworld's language of magic, i.e. knowingsomething's/someone's true namegives one power over it/them.)

_Feersum Endjinn_, Iain M. Banks Partly first-person narrative written in`fonetik' style, supposedly portraying the character's particular mode ofthought, a sort of see-things-as-they-are idea.

_Out of the Silent Planet_, C.S. Lewis The inhabitants of Mars cannotconceive of unjust or immoral acts, and our hero has to explain these humanconcepts to them in their own language which lacks terms for them.

_Startide Rising_, David Brin (And probably other novels set in the sameuniverse: the Uplift series). A Universe with many races and languages(including a dozen or so artificial lingue franche) where humans have madedolphins intelligent, with their own language. They speak in Haiku.

_The Man-Kzin Wars_ series, Larry Niven Warrior race of anthropomorphictigers speaks language reflecting their ethos ( la Klingon).

_Genetic Soldier_, George Turner A shipload of scientists from thenear-future returns, due to relativity, to a more distant-futurepost-holocaust Earth where English has evolved - linguist co-hero bridgesthe gap.

1984, George Orwell - Government attempts to control thought bymanipulating language. By making language simpler, the idea is that peoplewill be less creative.

Atlantis: the lost empire 2001 Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise. Disney animationin which a decipherer of ancient languages is crucial to the finding of thelost continent. Michael J. Fox does the linguist's voice.

Conceiving Ada 1997 Lynn Hershman-Leeson. A computer genius manages tocommunicate with the dead, and reaches Ada Lovelace, a forerunner of sortsfor computational linguistics.

2. Documentaries

2.1 Films on Language in general

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media 1992 Mark Achbar & PeterWintonick. Yes, this documentary about the man himself actually was shownat the cinemas. As the title suggests, though, it is more concerned withChomsky's political side than with linguistics. Ten years later followedPower and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times, directed by John Junkerman.

The Human Language Series . 1995. director: Gene Searchinger.NY: Ways of Knowing.part 1. Discovering Human Languagepart 2. Acquiring Human Languagepart 3. The Human Language Evolves(general linguistics and linguistic theory)

The Singer's Voice. 1993. By Joan Wall and Robert Caldwell.Dallas TX: Pst... Inc.

The Secret of the Wild Child. 1994. director: Linda Garmon.(NOVA documentary about Genie)

Signs of the Apes, Songs of the Whales. 1988. director: LindaHarrar. (Nova documentary about animal language)

2.2 Films on English

PBS production of ''The Story of English''

American Tongues. 1987.By Andrew Kolker and Louis Alvarez. NY: Center for New AmericanMedia.

2.3 Films on other languages

Stepping Razor Red X. 1992. director: Nicholas Campbell.(documentary with Jamaican Creole)

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics