American Tongues(1987)

Marc Okrand discusses his involvement with the Star Trek franchise and his work on inventing the Klingon and Vulcan languages.

Three images of a person running in the void through the movement of speed and abstract images

CodeSwitching is a mash-up of personal stories from three generations of African American students who participated in a landmark voluntary desegregation program. Shuttling between their inner-city Boston neighborhoods and predominantly white suburban schools in pursuit of a better education, they find themselves swapping elements of culture, language, and behavior to fit in with their suburban counterparts – Often acting or speaking differently based on their surroundings, called code-switching.

The Grammar Of Happiness follows the story of Daniel Everett among the extraordinary 'nonconvertible' Amazonian Pirah tribe, a group of indigenous hunter- gatherers whose culture and outlook on life has taken the world of linguistics by storm. As a young ambitious missionary three decades ago, Dan, a red-bearded towering American, decamped to the Amazon rain forest to save indigenous souls. His assignment was to translate the book of Mark into the tongue of the Pirah, a people whose puzzling speech seemed unrelated to any other on Earth. What he learned during his time with the Pirah led him to question the very foundations of his own deep beliefs. As a 'born again' atheist, Dan divorced his devout Christian wife and became estranged from his children. Having lost faith and family, his new life is dominated by the desire to leave behind his legacy. Everett's most controversial claim is that the Pirah language lacks 'recursion' - the ability to build an infinite number of sentences.

From the team behind Man on Wire comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. Following Nim's extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, the film is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal we tried to make human. What we learn about his true nature - and indeed our own - is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.

This award winning film is a fast paced, humorous look at the colorful way the residents of New Orleans express themselves - why they talk the way they do, where the words come from, and what it means to talk with a New Orleans accent.

What makes a voice “gay”? A breakup with his boyfriend sets journalist David Thorpe on a quest to unravel a linguistic mystery.

Fifteen images of a camera running in a park and in obscurity searching the space of light through distorsion and the sensory of rapid motion.

Twenty images of a camera running next to a chemical platform and capturing abstract light throught improvised gestures and asymmetrical motion

A series of interviews featuring linguist, philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky done in hand-drawn animation.

The story of the New York accent, as told by New Yorkers.