Linguistic Anthropology DVDs?

[Harold F. Schiffman]

I have taught a course called "Language and Popular Culture" for about 10
years now and use movies a lot.  Some have just the "moments" but I also
have some that are more extensive.  Anybody who wants to see what I have
can consult the website for this course at:

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/popcult/syllabus.html

I have some links there to movies about language and "disability",
deafness, non-standard language use, etc.

I have been asked by somebody at Oxford UP if I would write a textbook for
this topic, and I have agreed to do s.t. in a year or two when other
projects are done with.  But how I will link to the images and clips I
have on the topic is another question.  I currently keep all the images
and clips on a server that is accessible from the course link, but for
longer movie clips, I found it easier to keep them on my laptop, because
when I want to run them, it runs faster than from the Penn "moviemogul"
server.  So these clips won't run from the website (things like "Dances
with Wolves", "Phenomenon:, "ID4", lots of sci-fi stuff (Star Wars) plus
bits and pieces of other things...

Hal Schiffman


On Sat, 13 May 2006, Alexandre Enkerli wrote:

> Colleagues,
>
> Somewhat surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be a list of relevant DVDs
> in the linganth archives. People have talked about movie moments, which
> can be great for regular classroom use, but how about more extensive
> movies dealing specifically with linguistic topics?
> An interesting, though old, language movie is /American Tongues/. It
> doesn't seem to be out on DVD but it's a real classic. Some people talk
> about Melyn Bragg's /Adventure of English/ which sounds well-made and
> entertaining. But what about movies about linguistic diversity
> worldwide? Or some other language topics?
> Texas Tech has a list of movies on languages and linguistics which does
> include American Tongues and Adventure of English:
> http://library.ttu.edu/ul/subjects/humanities/english/language_videos.php
> This list seems to have interesting items but it'd be useful to have
> colleagues talk about their experiences showing some of these.
>
> Thanks in advance for your input!
>
> Alexandre Enkerli, lecturer
> Department of Anthropology
> Tufts University
>