This documentary follows the Eastern Band of Cherokee natives as they work to revitalize their endangered language. The Emmy award winning film was created by Danica Cullinan and Neal Hutcheson, and produced by Walt Wolfram.
When a language disappears, a lot is lost. A language is a repository of cultural wealth. Each language is a way of understanding and interpreting the world.
It carries the wealth of tradition in history, oral history, which can be extremely rich. Take the Bible, for example. For thousands years, that was oral history, before anything was written down. Homer is oral history.
And that’s all over the world. And we’re losing those treasures every time a language disappears.
And for the people themselves, they’re losing their identity. If English disappeared, we would lose our cultural identity, and the same is true if it’s a small group somewhere.
-linguist Noam Chomsky
