UNC Charlotte linguist restores lost language, culture for 'The New World'

UNC Charlotte linguist restores lost language, culture for 'The New World':

"The truism is that if you want to know a culture, learn the language. But what if the language and the culture are both dead – long, long dead?

Historical linguists, social scientists who are the archaeologists of cultures' ephemeral linguistic artifacts, have developed techniques that allow them to realistically re-create lost languages. The process, known as 'language revitalization,' has at least partially restored numerous languages that were known to have existed but were never recorded (or fully documented), literally allowing us to hear what the dead spoke.

Generally, this has been done for academic reasons or because a culture's descendants want to try to re-establish their identity by recovering some of their lost past. Now it has been done in order to create a major motion picture.

Language can be like cultural DNA, the genetic blueprint of how a civilization communicated and thought, containing the essence of a people's perspective and character. This is what Terrence Malick, director and writer of New Line Cinema's recent release The New World, discovered when he hired University of North Carolina at Charlotte linguist Blair Rudes to lend historical realism to the movie by coaching the cast in Virginia Algonquian, the language spoken by Pocahontas and other Native Americans who John Smith encountered in the founding of Jamestown."