MaLingua Film Critics List

Brought to you by popular demand is the following list of movies that feature linguists or linguistics. Lots of these are drawn from the LINGUIST archives--from the days when the List was livelier. Do you know of other, perhaps more recent linguistic films? Please edify your colleagues -- and help out the LL Fund Drive -- by telling us about them. We hope to keep adding to this list.

Alien vs. Predator

Comment: There's a linguist who reads Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs. This enables them to find out the true nature of the pyramids around the world.

The Silence (Bergman)

Comment: ". . . this is the plot as I recall: Some Swedes are stranded for a weekend in a hotel in an unidentified but obviously East European country where some sort of political turmoil has broken out. . . . The Swedish tourists' anxiety is at an unbearable pitch, because they do not understand a word of the language of the country they are in. . . . So they watch and try to guess what is going on and get nordically depressed. At the end of the movie the most enterprising of them, Ingrid Thulin as I recall, reveals that she has made a word list and so has turned the key in the lock of silence. Bergman had a lot of extras mill around in the streets and glare sullenly at the tanks. He must have told them to mutter things in an unintelligible tongue, so some of them took the obvious shortcut, and now and then you overhear people exchanging the most trivial things in Finnish."    [from LINGUIST 2.502]

Chan is Missing

Comment: " . . . has a minilecture on sociolinguistics; supposedly the character is based on Deborah Tannen."
    [from LINGUIST 2.464]

The Iceman

Comment: Linguistic decoding of Neanderthal language. " . . . as I recall, . . . they bring in "a linguist from MIT", who turns out to be a crusty older woman who stares a lot at a device labelled "Pitch-Stress Meter". . . . Phil Lieberman was listed in the credits as linguistic consultant."     [from LINGUIST 2.464]

The Dark Crystal

Comment: " . . . the humanoid Jen, wandering alone after some disaster, is befriended by another creature who takes him to her people and introduces him in what sounded to me like Serbian. . . . people who are sure they would recognize Serbian might want to check it out."     [from LINGUIST 2.467]

Day of the Dolphin

Comment: " . . . involves a project to teach English to dolphins. There is a scene in the movie where the researcher is telling someone about the dolphin's language acquisition; the filmmaker's attempts to prevent this from being dreadfully dull "talking heads" are ludicrous."     [from LINGUIST 2.467]

Forbidden Planet

Comment: " . . . classic SF movie from the 1950's. One of the main characters is a "philologist". This fact plays virtually no role in the movie, though.     [from LINGUIST 2.467]

Enemy Mine. 1985. director: Wolfgang Petersen.
(sci-fi film with alien language acquisition)

Daughters of the Dust. 1992. director: Julie Dash.
(film with lots of Gullah, spoken on Dafauskie Island on the Georgia coast.)

Star Trek:TNG "Darmok" episode 102. 1991.
(alien language based upon metaphor and analogy)

Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. 1984. director: Hugh Hudson.
(ape-man acquires language in record time)     [from LINGUIST 7.1708]

Spellbound

Comment:" ...Usually, their partner is a parent. Gale DeGideo looks dolefully at the camera and laments that in working with her daughter, April, she encounters so many words she can't pronounce. On the phone from Ambler, Pa., Ms. DeGideo recalled being so mired in tongue-twisting arcana that she didn't recognize the word "episode," turning it into "eePIZZodee." April figured it out anyway, and they laughed for 20 minutes."     [from LINGUIST 14.1248]