allthingslinguistic:

Looking for linguistics and language-related films to watch? Mary Ann Walter, a linguist who runs a linguistics film series at Middle East Technical University, Northern Cyprus, has kindly forwarded her very extensive list of linguistically-relevant movies, documentaries, and episodes of TV shows, and given me permission to post it. 

I have only watched some of these movies and have only very lightly edited Mary Ann’s notes, so I cannot vouch for all of them, but I hope this list is helpful to people! If you know of any linguistically-relevant films that we’ve somehow missed, do add them in the comments. Asterisks indicate ones that are available on youtube. 

Sci-fi/speculative

• Arrival, 2016
  
• Star Trek Darmok episode, 1991.
  
• Pontypool. 2008. Horror. In a Canadian town, the English language somehow gets infected and makes them zombies.
• The Falls. 1980. Mock documentary about something which killed many and left others with strange symptoms, including suddenly speaking new languages.
  
• *Het Dak van de Walvis (On Top of the Whale) 1982 Raoul Ruiz. Parody of much of western academia. A group of field linguists set out to study an exotic language which consists only of one single word, which therefore means everything. Very strange, not a crowdpleaser.
• Being John Malkovich. Also features a single word language.

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