The Linguists

[Indistinct Whispering]

Around the age of eight or nine,
I discovered I had a

somewhat irrational interest
in the world's languages.

[fire blazes]

[Bollywood music]

[music continues]

[chalk on chalkboard]

A linguist is a scientist
who studies language;

not just to learn the languages....

>>The word for some is [indistinct], which
means: eye of the sky.

>>....but to figure out the possible ways
that the human mind can make sense

of the world around it.

[typing, indistinct audio]

There are more than 7,000 languages
in the world.

People are usually surprised
when they hear that number.

>>So, you think you're talk's
going to run long?

The other thing that people are
surprised to learn

is that small languages

are disappearing at the rate
of one every two weeks or so.

[light banter]

>>Going to talk today about these areas,
with concentrations of endangered languages;

these are really places that we
need to act immediately on.

>>When a language is in danger, we worry
that some kind of unique way

of seeing the world could be lost.

These are some of the languages that we're
interested in documenting.

We have to find the areas
that are most in need.

[Festival music]

Areas with a history of colonization.

Where a people came, imposed their
will and their government

and their language on the people.

Languages get lower and
lower status in a community.

They are actively suppressed or
at least, actively discouraged.

[speaking in indigenous language]

>>Often times it's young children making this
decision to stop using the ancestral language.

[Farmyard sounds]

[cow moos]

Then when those children grow up-

the language is effectively gone.

[music and indistinct chatter]

What can we learn from these languages
before they vanish?

[speaking indigenous language]

When people hear "Siberia"
>>They shudder!

>>They think snow and ice;
but Siberia is inhabited.

The first people that came from European Russia,
came to exploit the native communities

for money, resources, and things; and
then later where waves of settlers.

Russian is a killer language;

it's the reason that native
Siberian languages are being wiped out.

>>That's nowhere! It's
not near...anything! [laughter]

>>People live there apparently. From
there we're going to go up river

to Ka-sha-noa [phonetically] which is not
on the map, but people say it's there.

[Russian folk music]

>>David is a specialist
in sounds and words

and is an excellent language learner.

He picks up languages like a sponge.

>>Greg is the expert on verbs.

He has looked at more verbs
in more languages than anybody I know.

We've been working in Siberia
for six years or so,

and we were looking for
a new language to document.

[Russian folk music continues]

I can't wait for you to meet Boris, he's got
these amazing notebooks up there in the lab.

>>Tell him your excited to see those.

>>I think they're from 1971-1972.

>>Our first goal was to go to the Tomsk
Laboratory of Siberian Languages.

[speaking Russian]

>>One of the least documented languages of
Siberia we discovered is called: Chulym.

Boris, the professor we met at the lab,
opened a big, metal safe

and we pulled out the last
active research on Chulym.

Someone had worked on Chulym
in the 60's and 70's;

so there had been a thirty-year hiatus,
where no one has even visited the community.

>>Some of the words she
was looking for she didn't find-

the word for "law", there's no entry.

>>Thirty years is a long time for a
language which is already

losing speakers --you know --the majority
of the fluent speakers are going

to have died in those thirty years.

[music]

>>We were doing this on a shoestring-
we had almost no information,

we didn't know if there were two speakers
left, or twenty speakers left-

so I was in a bit of a panic.

[laughter]

We hired a driver
to take us to Tegul’det,

which is the first Chulym village
we needed to visit .

>>We need to find the town administrator.

[indistinct Russian]

[Russian]

The Mayor of Tegul'det was
a little bit gruff with us cause,

of course, we were just foreigners
that showed up randomly in his town.

We got a lot of negative comments, we
just sort of, nodded and smiled politely.

The mayor assigned
Bossia [guessed spelling]

a very big Chulym guy,
to be our guide and driver.

>>This is a guy whose 52 years old or so,

>>and this is a community
where we don't expect

people who are 52 to speak
the language at all.

[Russian folk music]

>>On our first visit to a community we
want to take a kind of census

and figure out how many speakers
are there and what do they know.

[speaking in Russian]

>>Our first real speaker turned out
to be very hard of hearing.

[Russian]

It's hard with a dying
or endangered languages

because most of the speakers are elderly.

[speaking Chulym]

>>He's lived here since 1961, that was
our first sentence in Chulym.

[door creaking]

>>Our second speaker,

alternated between shouting at us,

and saying that she loved us.

I wouldn't really call it a conversation.

>>Yeah, it was a monologue
that we got to listen to.

[speaking in Russian or Chulym]

>>She says you must be a Cossack.

>>In order to study a language, you need
speakers who can sit, and focus.

[speaking in Russian or Chulym]

After meeting our first two real speakers,
we were a little discouraged.

The third speaker that we were taken
to meet, she was in her nineties.

[Speaking Russian]

She was almost completely deaf.

The real revelation was our driver.

[speaking chulym]

He started talking in perfect Chulym;

>>so of course we were like: [jaw drops].

Often people will deny knowledge of
the language and later, turn out to speak it.

Native Siberian children were
sent to boarding schools,

they were forbidden to speak
their language by their school teachers.

[engine revving]

Historically, boarding schools have been
an unmitigated disaster

for indigenous languages.

[indistinct talking]

>>Boarding schools for tribal children,

have existed in lots
of areas around the world.

[lake noises]

>>I went to boarding school,

if you were caught speaking your
language you were punished.

>>When I was about 3 month old my
grandmother took me.

She took me from my mom and dad when they
weren't getting along too good;

so she raised me, and that's all she
spoke- the Chemehuevi

>>His grandmother raised him, and through
that time, that's all she spoke-

she didn't speak any English, she
only spoke Chemehuevi

[tractor noise]

>>[speaking Chemehuevi]

[continues speaking Chemehuevi]

So I just said my name and
that I speak Chemehuevi language

and I speak it to myself,
cause there's nobody to talk to,

all the elders have passed on and,
you know, that's.....

......I speak to myself, that's it.

Language is a great part of your culture,

and a great part of identity
of who we are as people.

It's your breath that you take, without
you language, you might as well be dead.

>>There's a lot of words I forgot,
but I'm getting help with it.

[truck starts]

These CDs, they're recorded from back in 1969.

[English word and Chemehuevi equivalent]

[children talking indistinctly]

[child practicing English]

[Bollywood music]

>>We've visited the boarding school in India.

[Bollywood music]

There are kids from approximately sixty,
indigenous minority groups.

It's an efficient way to give
them a good education.

However, bringing all of these
children to a central location,

educating them in English,

exposing them to the practice
of the Hindu religion,

does exert subtle,
or maybe not so subtle,

pressures on their identity
as a tribal person.

[general noise]

>>This is where they're learning
sewing techniques?

>>Yes.

[sewing machine whirring]

[indistinct pleasantries]

>>What subject is this?

>>Mathmatics.

[indistinct talking]

>>We went to meet the Tribal students,

to ask them what language did they speak
at home.

That would lead us, in turn, to
go to those villages,

>>Where is your villiage?
Where is your home?

and find speakers of endangered
languages who would work with us.

[speaking indigenous language]

>>When I was nine and ten and eleven,

I went through a series of trying to teach
myself various languages.

Norwegian, and Urdu and Albanian.
Always at that age.

[speaking indigenous language]

As I got older,

even professional linguists haven't heard
of many of the languages I've worked on.

>>Ho is not even the funniest-sounding
North Munda language name-

Birhor definitely beats that one.
You practically can't have a language name

that's more bad-sounding in English
than "Birhor" [snickers]

[traffic noise]

>>We've become interested
in the Sora language.

[general noise]

>>You need permission from
the state government

to go onto the Tribal lands.

[indistinct chatter about purchases]

>>It's not easy to get that access.

[traffic noise]

>>We know an Indian scholar,
Dr. Manideepa Patnaik.

[indistinct friendly chatter]

>>Her father is the personal friend of
many government officials, and like

anywhere in the world,
it matters who you know.

>>This is permission to go to Tribal areas
for research studies.

[singing in indigenous language]

>>One of the teachers that we met at
the school was Mr Panda who teaches

English and music.

[indigenous singing continues]

>>Question is, does he want to go?

>>He wants to come, he wants to come.

>>Manideepa decided to invite Mr Panda
to help locate individuals who knew

traditional Sora songs and dances.

[Train whistle]

>>Good, how are you? Ready
for our trip?

>>Our expedition consisted of David and
myself- the linguists-

Mr Panda from the Tribal school,

Manideepa Patnaik, and her
son who's eight or nine years old.

[train noises]

[soft singing in indigenous language]

[child singing softly]

>>The song lyrics, got our ears
ready to listen to the Sora language.

>>I recognized some interesting structures
and, of course, that made me very happy.

>>India is not an egalitarian society.

You are born into a
particular cast, a social group.

[train noise]

Tribals in India, because
many of them are non-Hindu, they are

oustside of the cast system- they're below it.

These are areas that
are restricted to outsiders.

We have to have higher cast, educated
Indian people responsible for us.

There was a little
but of nervousness.

[train whistle]

>>This is an area that's been reported to
be heavily controlled by Naxalites.

There was ten people killed, recently,
not too far away; so we just have to

keep our eyes open and our ears
open and be careful of course.

[hip hop music]

>>The Tribal areas are areas
where you find this insurgents.

They hide out in different areas, it's
not like they have a big, neon sign

saying: Here are the Naxals!

[shouting]

Their ideology is sort of Robin Hood-like:

take from the rich to give to the poor.

[hip hop music]

There have been instances where people
have been targeted, and in fact, killed.

[hip hop music continues]

[raking and machinery noises]

>>The Sora language has about
300,000 speakers.

[indistinct noises and talking]

Here in India there are a billion people,
300,000 barely registers on the radar.

The Sora always have to learn and
use other languages to communicate.

[drums]

>>We haven't brought enough candy
for this village, have we?

We were taken to our first Sora village.

[more drums]

As linguists, we're not there to
study music per say;

[various musical instruments]

but Mr Panda went in and said,

"We have some visitors who would
like to see a musical performance.

[singing in Sora]

That was the signal for people to come
flooding into the central square.

[very upbeat music]

[very upbeat music continues]

Even though we had
instigated the performance,

they didn't seem to want to stop.

It was probably about 100 degrees,

>>people were drinking wine - I was
drinking wine

>>drinking was happening
and drinking and hot sun

can lead to- you know- trouble.

[indistinct talking]

>>You want to say something?

[chattering crowd]

[indistinct talking
in indigenous language]

>>Who is the head here in the village?

[speaking indigenous language]

>>Who is the oldest person?

>>I want to give him a gift, is that ok?
>>How much?

>>I give him a thousand. Tell him that
it's for everyone to share

and, uh, it's from us-

and we appreciate their...
[trails off]

[speaking indigenous language]

it's for everyone to share, yeah.

Gift-giving is one of the
most highly regulated behaviors.

>>He's not happy.

We started an argument.

As an outsider, you
can never quite get it right.

[indistinct arguing]

Mr Panda is a Brahman,
a high caste Indian,

and that gives him a natural kind
of standoffish-ness

>>Their not happy about it..

>>from the communities
that he's so interested in.

>>Oh yeah, how much does he want?

Okay, no problem.

[indistinct arguing]

We were counting on him to negotiate
the very delicate situation,

and it was a fiasco.

[continued, indistinct arguing]

The money was excepted after
some protracted negotiations;

>>So, he will be happy with 15,000?

and then the dancing continued.

[hip hop music]

[video frozen- no sound]

In contrast to Greg, who
likes to look at data

from hundreds and hundreds
of languages,

>>Near here? Where do you live?

I basically focus on just
a few languages -

I like to live in the culture.

>>Our Indian colleagues were
fretting about me staying in a village.

>>She wanted an Indian person there, and
an Indian man in particular,

and really, the only person in the crew
that fit that bill, was Mr Panda.

>>Perfect!

It really isn't important to me, it is to
David for some reason, so....

...um...but...

that's because I don't think
he understands, really,

what the situation here is.

>>It's my duty as an Ethnographer.

>>Everyone has to do what they're
comfortable with--

when I was younger, I didn't care
about things like the insurgent thing-

that's not my life now,

my life is: I have two children to raise
and I just can't do stupid things.

>>This is a phenomenal
well -look at this-

it's built like a fallout shelter,
or something.

>>I hope everything is fine,

we're like, real close to
the "bad" area here.

[road noise]

>>I was thinking that we should've tried
hard to leave an hour earlier,

we don't really want to spend too much
time on the roads at night;

that's when danger level increases.

>>We were told there's a village just a couple
miles up the road, and I could stay there.

>>There's really nothing
we can do about it.

You just got to assume that
we're going to be fine.

[nature noises]

>>There's signing and dancing- you hear
the flutes up ahead?

[indistinct talking and music]

[music grows louder, cheering]

>>We were immediately sucked into
this mass of dancing people.

[music continues]

Not being much of a dancer of any style,
it was a little hard to keep up with the...

>>They seemed very pleased
with your dance steps. [laughter]

[music and cheering]

>>The women have particular way of dancing
where they lock arms around the waist

and kind of flow in a side to side thing,
and it was literally pulsating.

It was like being in the mosh pit.

>>Yeah, but we're not quite a
dangerous as a mosh pit -

>>not dangerous at all-
it felt great!

[music continues]

[video frozen - no sound]

>>I'm not just content to sit in a room
interviewing a speaker of a language,

you have to breathe it in-

get out and dance
with the people.

You'll learn the language
much quicker anyway.

[crowd noises]

[chicken clucking]

>>I see, that's terrible.

[indistinct talking]

>>That's terrible.

>>Good morning to all of you sirs.

>>Was it comfortable?

>>Very comfortable.
You look very elegant today.

>>Is that so? Thanks.

>>Yes, it is so.

>>Not a single, I don't have a single
mosquito bite.

>>Let's just set up outside, it's so
dark in there, let's just set up here.

>>Our first interview,
with a speaker of Sora,

was with a man,
approximately 50 years old.

[speaking in Sora]

>>We like to use the language.

Even when we only
know a dozen words.

Cause it's a little bit weird, having
people with microphones, in your face.

[music in the distance]

>>It's a lot of music coming
from the village.

Can you count to ten for me?

>>One, two three, test
four, five, six, test.

Ok, are we on?

>>We are on, yep.

>>We have this process
of sharing information.

This is what we call "elicitation",

that's how you get
a comprehensive,

description of the language.

[English word, then Sora word]

>>You'd start the elicitation

[video frozen - no sound]

with basic things, we
started with body parts.

>>You move on to colors,

and then numbers.

[speaking English and Sora]

>>His youngest son is twelve.

When he said thirteen,

he repeated the word we had
just heard for twelve,

and added the word one to it.

>>It's the base 12 system?
>>Yeah. [excited laughter]

>>This is not usual,
English uses ten as a base.

>>Then we got to 30, and he said, "20-10".

It's base 20 now.
>>It's 12 - 20.

>>Yeah.

>>So that's a different base, that's
a base 20 system.

>>Now he's using 12 and 20 as a base;

so, as he counts higher,
which one is he going to use?

Turns out he's going to use both of them;

so you get to 32...

[Sora]

>>Our favorite number in Sora

turned out to be ninety-three.

>> It's a magnificent system;
it keeps recycling at the 12.

>>It was:

>>That's how you
say "ninety-three" in Sora.

>>We think it's one of the
most complicated numbers,

that we might ever see,
in the language of the world.

We're scientists;

>>we should try to figure out what
these different ways of knowing math

are before they all get
flattened out and vanish.

>>Yes, thank-you, thank-you sir.

>>I don't see how you can justify
devoting your research career

to the syntax of French-

[indistinct]

a language with millions of speakers.

>>When the skills that you posses could
help document a language that

is going to go extinct in your lifetime.

[indistinct murmuring]

[indistinct murmuring continues]

[street noise]

>>More than 80% of the plant and
animal species that exist on this planet

have not yet been named
or described by western science-

more than 80%.

>>How many different types of medicinal
plants does she have just here?

>>It doesn't mean that those
species are unknown to humans;

it means they're unknown
to western science.

Our main focus in Bolivia was a language
called "Kallawaya".

[music]

The Kallawaya are famous
for their healing practices.

Their language provides information about
the medicinal uses of plants.

>>Ten thousand of them.

>>Right, ten thousand plants!

Kallawaya is a language
with under a hundred speakers.

It's been small for centuries,

but it's still around.

>>Even with the colonial language,
Spanish, continuing to expand,

we wanted to find out what are the
internal strengths of Kallawaya-

allowing it to stick around.

[street noise]

>>Look at that awesome mountain.

[music]

>>Bolivia was one of the most
linguistically diverse areas in the world.

Canichana - that's gone, that was a
language I spoke, it's extinct.

We're watching the diversity go "poof".

>>To get to the Kallawaya you have to go
up and over a mountain pass.

>>Through a windy, windy, incredibly
dangerous mountain road.

>>It's just a barren, rocky landscape
populated by llamas.

You keep going up and up and up;

you get to Lake Titicaca.

>>It's a big, big lake and bright blue.

>>We hit a minor delay...

[general noises]

>>The first Kallawaya healer
that we met

was a man named
Max Chura [guessed spelling];

and we just met him completed by accident.

>>We told him what we were doing and
he started giving a few Kallawaya words.

So, we were definitely kind of salivating,
like: "Yeah! We got to get this guy!"

>>Serendipity strikes again!

We meet the healer, on the road,
coming towards us with his bundle.

>>But Max told us he was busy;

so we set up an
appointment to meet him later;

and then we went on our way;

and it turned out to be
a really interesting 48 hours.

[hip hop music]

>>We went to Waynatambo, which
is a radio station in Bolivia.

>>We are very interested
in endangered languages and

finding out what people are
doing to keep their language alive.

>>I won't lie, and when we were sitting
there I didn't feel good at all.

[rapping]

I'd had no sleep that night and was
feeling miserable.

[cow chewing grass]

>>We were camping along
the shores of Lake Titticaca.

[frustrated noises]

>>It was really, really cold outside
and I did not feel good.

>>It's rapidly getting dark.

[zipper]

>>It was hard to enjoy the pristine
beauty of the area when you're vomiting.

>>The only things I care about are getting
another hour of sleep,

and having some kind of
carbonated soda.

I was getting really sick, but there's
only a finite amount time here.

>>His name is Jose

>>Hola Jose, como esta?

>>We encountered a 12 year old boy
who said that his father was

a Kallawaya Healer;

so naturally that
sparked our interest.

>>Hey Will?

>>Will Faulkner [guessed spelling]
accompanied us,

>>I think this kid's in a hurry.

he's a linguistics major.

>>Part of our mission is to train students
to carry on this work.

>>Okay good, okay great,

okay, then we'll interview his father.

[greeting each other in Spanish]

[upbeat music]

[English and Kallwaya]

>>It became clear during the interview

that this man didn't, in fact, speak Kallawaya.

>>There was almost no words in there that
were Kallawaya words-

he had a couple at the end, but...

>>He spoke only Quechua,

which is the largest of the indigenous
languages of the Andes.

[pencil scratching on paper]

[nature noises]

>>It reminds me of something.

>>Yeah, it reminds me of something too
and I can't quite figure out what.

>>By digging into the
Kallawaya language...

[speaking Kallawaya]

...we can find the medicinal knowledge
possessed by the Kallawaya.

>>That's our first flirtation with
Bolivian, traditional healing;

so down the hatch.

>>This knowledge is incredibly valuable

to humanity as a whole, and we really

shouldn't be in the business of
squandering it,

or letting it just fade away,
without documenting it.

[upbeat Bolivian music]

>>After we met our first person who
claimed to be a speaker but wasn't;

we were very excited to talk to Max.

[upbeat, Bolivian music continues]

>>You've ever seen "Head",
the Monkees movie?

It's like a Tour de Force in
psychedelic absurdity.

>>Americans are a little more
time-frame oriented,

and when we say

we'll meet you at one o'clock,

we mean one maybe one thirty.

>>We had given money to Max because we
knew that he was a speaker.

>>Pay up, pay up my bet.

>>Yo! How much did you bet?
Ten billion Euros?

>>I said five will get you ten, that
he's not here. [laughs]

Yep.

Holy moly.

>>The problem though is that we have so
few speakers of this language,

that we will ever have access to.

We were a little impatient.

All this work, all this travel,
all - you know- getting ill.

>>Well, what can you say? I mean how can
that guy, with a straight face,

think that that would be ok, you know?

>>Yeah.

>>We were waiting for him for hours.

>>Hours that day, but weeks of
preparation,

to hear what he has to say.

[footsteps]

>>Even though we weren't there
to study the rituals,

we agreed to have him
preform a ritual for us,

before the elicitation.

[indistinct murmuring]

>>The Kallawaya, cast cocoa leaves;

then try to read the patterns.

[blowing]

[speaking indigenous langauge]

>>I mean, what can you say? He's right.

[boat noises]

>>In the race to document dying languages,

time is not on your side.

[Truck noises]

>>We've had speakers tells us, "I wish
you'd come five years ago.

You could've talk to my uncle, my cousin.

Why hasn't anyone taken
an interest before?

>>Greg, you're going to elicit.

>>Bossia [guessed spelling],

was a speaker.

>>Once you meet the first speaker,
then all the doors seem to open to you.

[indistinct chatter and soft music]

>>Anytime we interacted with
the elderly speakers, Bossia

would encourage them
to speak the language

by speaking with them as well.

>>That was "Hello"

>>You start small, you start asking
for individual words,

and then,

eventually, they'll start
giving you sentences,

without you even having to ask for it.

[upbeat music]

[speaking in Kallwaya]

>>He said, "My name is Max Churra."
[guessed spelling]

>>We didn't ask him for that.

He gave a ten or twelve or fifteen
sentence long story.

[speaking Kallawaya]

>>No where is there
a short narrative or text

that's ever been published or,
as far as we know, recorded.

>>So obviously we were like: "Yeah buddy!"
That was fun! [laughter]

[indistinct talking
in indigenous language]

[laughter]

>>She doesn't believe us.

>>We need to go back at least
for two or three of these verbs,

and get the negatives for them.

>>Chulym's got all kinds of
complicated structures.

>>Anything can be a verb- so if you say,
"I went out Moose hunting."

In English you need a whole sentence,

in Chulym that's one verb:

>>If your view of the world's languages,

was based on languages
like English or Chinese,

we'd say it has to be a set of individual
words strung together in a sentence;

and Chulym is a language
that says, no you don't,

you can make that one word.

[indistinct]

>>When we collect data,

the rightful owner of this material
is not the scientist;

it's the community
that produced it.

[Chulym]

So, we want to share it with them.

[recording playing - laughter and Chulym]

[Chulym continues from recording]

[laughs]

>>This can be a really amazing
moment in the field.

Many of these people have never heard
their own voice on a recording,

and they have never
seen their own image

in digital form.

>>A lot of times people were abandoning
these languages for the very reason

that they feel that they're
not useful in the modern world.

[speaking Chulym]

>>To see them represented in such
an amazingly high-tech way,

it really shows them that: well, maybe our
language isn't so backwards after all,

maybe I have a knowledge
which really is special.

>>Then you can disseminate the data to
the community of scientists.

[applause]

>>Those are very different audiences.

>>There's a thought in the academic
community that: oh Kallawaya is not

a real language, it's just Quechua.

I was like: listen to this,
if you speak Quechua,

you know for a fact
that this is not Quechua.

>>If you'd like, we'll play a clip
right now for you to hear.

[recording of Max speaking Kallawaya]

>>We were able to bring them a digital
recording of a Kallawaya sentence.

It's something that's never
existed before;

and it just drives home to people:
Kallawaya is really unique(!)

and they posses knowledge
that's under threat.

[indistinct murmurings]

>>Max Churra [guessed spelling] was
clearly an expert practitioner

of Kallawaya healing rituals.

[indistinct murmurings]

>>Max prepared this amazing set of objects,

llama fat and llama wool,

[indistinct murmuring continues]

cocoa leaves and llama fetuses,

[more indistinct murmurings]

[blowing]

>>We didn't know what
to expect, at all, really.

[indistinct murmurings continue]

[heartbeats]

[silence]

>>We've seen lots of rituals.

>>It had all the core elements:

the use of blood sacrifice,

fire,

and the empowered inter-mediator,
in the person of the medicine man.

[indistinct murmuring continues]

>>Part of what makes a ritual effective,

is that you couldn't perform
what that person is doing.

[indistinct]

and so they garble the language;

and they intentionally obscure it.

>>The Kallawaya language
couldn't possibly

be only transmitted
by memorization of the ritual,

because it was virtually inaudible
and in comprehensible.

[music]

>>No where in the
scientific literature do they explain

how this language has been transmitted.

[general noise]

[laughter]

>>The normal way that
language is transmitted

is that the infant begins hearing language
as soon as they're born;

[indigenous language]

and by age 7 or 8, they've
acquired the language effortlessly.

[indigenous language]

Kallawaya is not that kind of language.

Nobody learns it from birth.

It's transmitted from adult males,
to teenage males,

to avail themselves
of the medicinal knowledge.

[speaking Kallawaya]

[Kallawaya continues]

This might be the key to the survival
of Kallawaya.

Their language provides their livelihood.

[speaking Kallawaya]

[indigenous language]

>>That is something that
we don't typically find.

[CD being inserted into player]

[speaking/teaching indigenous language]

>>People are choosing to abandon
their native language

because, they perceive,

that they'll have more
economic advantages.

[music]

[general noise]

>>It was really important to come back to
the school at the end of the trip.

[reading to students]

We had seen where these
school students come from.

We had met some of their siblings back
in the villages.

[water gurgling]

>>The school will provide a conduit for
people to increase their economic standing.

[traffic noise]

[general noise]

>>My head, you know,

it's probably bigger
than their heads- it fits me.

[rustling]

>>I'll grab this one

[more rustling and footsteps]

[gentle music]

>>We want to thank-you for helping us;

we've learned a lot,

and we want to come back again

and continue working
on tribal languages.

{speaks indigenous language]

We hope that you will also continue to
speak your own languages,

and not give them up.

[applause]

>>Good luck with your exams.

[music continues]

[speaking in indigenous language]

>>Children don't have to give one language
in order to speak another one.

[practicing English]

But none the less, once
they've made the decision,

it tends to be irreversible.

[soft music]

>>Chulym is a language that
doesn't have a writing system.

>>The vast majority of endangered
are, in fact, unwritten.

>>Interestingly, Vasya,

who is our youngest
and most fluent speaker,

he had already invented his own writing
system, using Russian letters.

[music]

[indistinct]

[speaking in indigenous language
continues]

[soft music]

>>The children drew some
really nice pictures for us;

[soft music continues]

and we've got the text in Chulym.

We just put that together
and we'll have the first

book published in Chulym.

>>Chulym story book- and it will be a
true community project.

>>We're looking for Chulym surnames,
Chulym names on the tombstones.

[soft string music]

>>That's one, that's a Chulym grave.

[soft string music continues]

>>It's hard to really explain the
satisfaction you can have watching

people reconnect, in essence, with their
history. >>Their past. >>Yeah.

[soft string music]

[soft string music continues]