What If Babel Was Just a Myth?

Overview

On the banks of the Moyen-Chari River in southern Chad, young linguist Florian Lionnet is documenting Láàl, a language isolate only spoken in two small villages and threatened of disappearing in the short to medium term. In the steps of Lionnet, the film goes out to meet villagers and explore their relation to languages. People in this part of the world speak between five and seven languages. With their testimonies, one discovers a deeply multilingual humanity, made up of a myriad societies, each endlessly using language to encode its knowledge, its culture, and much more: its entire worldview. Could it be that multilingualism is the “natural” state of humanity? And what do we lose with the death of all these small languages?