Movies: Linguistics

Taking place after alien crafts land around the world, an expert linguist is recruited by the military to determine whether they come in peace or are a threat....

Evan Birch is a family man and esteemed professor at a distinguished university. When a female student goes missing, police Detective Malloy has reason to be suspicious when crucial evidence makes Evan the prime suspect in her disappearance....

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. Fol...

This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make t...

The tragic true story of one of the worst cases of child abuse ever documented (in which a girl was locked in a room without social contact for nearly thirteen years) and what happened when she was finally rescued....

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

The Cherokee language is deeply tied to Cherokee identity; yet generations of assimilation efforts by the U.S. government and anti-Indigenous stigmas have forced the Tri-Council of Cherokee tribes to declare a State of Emergency for the language in 2...

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

A man wakes from a coma speaking a fully formed but unrecognizable language baffling linguistic experts from around the globe....

This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make t...

This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make t...

This apocalyptic linguistic comedy meditates on the relationship between language, meaning and social decay and is scripted from "double-speak" language found in a variety of media sources. Drawing its title from the Pentagon's term for crash, Involu...

This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make t...

Rich in humor and regional color, this sometimes hilarious film uses the prism of language to reveal our attitudes about the way other people speak. From Boston Brahmins to Black Louisiana teenagers, from Texas cowboys to New York professionals, Amer...

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 suburba...

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 y...

Sam decides to stop pursuing charges against her rapist and spend Thanksgiving alone on her family's Virginia farm. Her brother stages an intervention with seven of Sam’s friends to persuade her to return....

This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make t...

We all have a dream... Nelson's dream is to learn how to read. He works at a traffic light in Maputo selling car products to people who stop. Every week a teacher joins him and all the others like him to teach them. With the hope of learning, Nelson ...

An in-depth look at the work and views of the man described as 'one of the greatest minds in human history'. He first emerged through his pioneering work in linguistics in the 1950s but later became a political activist and a critic of US foreign pol...