American Tongues

Jun 24, 1987

0h 57m

★ 7.0

A film about the way we talk

Overview

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, American Tongues elicits funny, perceptive, sometimes shocking, and always telling comments on American English in all its diversity. (PBS)

Genres

Documentary

Production Companies

Center for New American Media

American Tongues Trailers

No Trailers found.

Cast

No Cast found.

"This project consists a visual fluidity of construction, harmony and thoughts taking colors and length from this body of autonomy. Different images between figuration and abstraction are created by meaning and phenomenon letting the decoupage revealing a piece of a strange underworld. I built it like a window opened to the fresh air of improvisation by familiar landscapes, those exact moments articulating a connection between light and movement."

0.0

Treno di parole - Viaggio nella poesia di Raffaello Baldini

Oct 20, 2018

The œuvre of poet Raffaello Baldini (1924-2005) through the words of those who knew him, the poems he himself read, the fragments of his monologues, his beloved Romagna landscapes.

6.8

Project Nim

Jul 8, 2011

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.

10.0

We Will Speak

Mar 23, 2023

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 2019. While there are 430,000 Cherokee citizens in the three federally recognized tribes, fewer than an estimated 2,000 fluent speakers remain—the majority of whom are elderly. The covid pandemic has unfortunately hastened the course. Language activists, artists, and the youth must now lead the charge of urgent radical revitalization efforts to help save the language from the brink of extinction.

4.0

Das Geheimnis von Bern

May 8, 2025

Whether in rock, pop, rap or slam: the people of Bern have dominated the dialect music scene in German-speaking Switzerland for many years. Why does Bern rock Switzerland?

9.0

The Unanswered Question V : The Twentieth Century Crisis

Jan 11, 1976

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 these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse: Lecture 5 picks up at the early twentieth century with an oncoming crisis in Western Music. As these lectures have traced the gradual increase and oversaturation of ambiguity, Bernstein now designates a point in history that took ambiguity too far.

7.6

If These Knishes Could Talk: The Story of the NY Accent

May 16, 2013

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

6.9

Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?

Nov 22, 2013

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

0.0

CodeSwitching

Jun 24, 2019

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.

0.0

Talkers

Nov 8, 2016

The three speakers represent two of the dialects, with the most common one - the middle dialect spoken in Riga and central parts of Latvia - not featured in the film. In intimate surroundings, a farmer, a schoolteacher, and a herder of ostriches talk about perceived differences between Latvian speakers, and about language policy and their lives.

8.0

The Grammar of Happiness

Jan 25, 2012

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.

0.0

Scouts Are Cancelled

Apr 25, 2007

Director John Scott crafts this look at the curious life of his longtime friend John Stiles — an aspiring writer and former telephone marketer whose midlife meltdown worked wonders for his career. Stiles was down on his luck working as a telemarketer in Toronto when, one day, he threw out his pre-written script and began speaking to customers in curious character voices inspired by his upbringing in Nova Scotia. That month, Stiles made the most sales of any employee and earned a free DVD player for his efforts. In the following years, Stiles threw caution to the wind, venturing out to local open mic nights — where he developed a substantial cult following — and later publishing a pair of books with Insomniac press.

0.0

Running Fields III

Nov 29, 2024

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

9.0

The Unanswered Question IV : The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity

Jan 11, 1976

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 these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse: Bernstein provides two distinct meanings of the term ambiguity. The first is "doubtful or uncertain" and the second, "capable of being understood in two or more possible senses"

0.0

Running Fields IV

Dec 13, 2024

Twenty-four images of a camera running in the woods, a moonlight and a cemetery through improvised gestures, mechanical abstraction and saturated colors

0.0

Running Fields II

Nov 15, 2024

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.

American Tongues

Overview

Genres

Production Companies

American Tongues Trailers

Cast

You may also like

Do I Sound Gay?

Omegäng

Aranzazú, a memory of ruins

Yeah You Rite!

Hunting Confessions