Filming "Breath of Life-Silent No More" California Indian Language Restoration Workshop
With support from the National Science Foundation, Ironbound Films, Inc., will film "Breath of Life-Silent No More" California Indian Language Restoration Workshop at the University of California at Berkeley from June 5 through 10, 2004. The Workshop brings together about fifty American Indians interested in reviving or maintaining their native tongues. It shows participants how to locate and understand scientific research on their languages and then use what they find to teach the language to others. Ironbound will follow participants as they sift through linguists and anthropologists' field notebooks and audio recordings, from digital tapes to one-hundred-year-old wax cylinders. Participants will be filmed as they attempt to understand the words of their ancestors and decipher the phonetic writing and grammatical annotations used by the scientists who documented them. Linguists will be filmed as they instruct participants in the most innovative methods of teaching these languages to their communities. The footage will be a critical component of Vanishing Voices (working title), a one-hour documentary on language endangerment. Vanishing Voices takes viewers from Native Siberia to Native America, from ancient texts to cutting-edge technology, to demonstrate how scientists record-even help revive-the world's tongues.
Linguists estimate that, of more than 6,800 languages in the world, as many as ninety percent will not survive the century; an average of one dies every two weeks. The rapid rate of language loss hinders the development of theories about language variation and therefore human cognition; debilitates the reconstruction of linguistic prehistory and therefore human prehistory; and prevents the tapping of indigenous knowledge of the environment. It is essential that the public understand how language loss affects science and how scientists are preparing. Vanishing Voices will be America's first look at how languages become endangered, and the awesome task of documenting and preserving them. Footage from the "Breath of Life-Silent No More" Workshop will demonstrate how people with languages no longer spoken are learning and applying scientific methods to help bring their languages back into use.
