This two-hour documentary asks: What do we lose when a language dies? What does it take to
save a language? Written, produced, and directed by award-winning filmmaker David Grubin and hosted by poet Bob Holman, the program travels to a remote island off the coast of Australia where 400 Aboriginal people speak 10 different languages, all at risk; to Wales, where Welsh, once in danger, is today making a comeback; and to Hawaiʻi, where Hawaiians are fighting to save their native language. Grubin says: “Most people in the world speak more than one language—monolingualism is a recent phenomenon. We’re really celebrating diversity, looking at the vast domains of creativity, knowledge and thought encoded in language and what is lost when a language disappears.”

Divided into three acts, act three focuses on the Hawaiian language:

The Hawaiian language was connected to everything… whether it was the name of a wind, a whispering sea, a rain that fell, a star that streaked across the sky… These things all connected you to place and were filled with spirit... And the moment that we severed their ability to speak their language, we separated them from a knowledge. From a spirit. From an identity, who they are as a people.

Kepā Maly
Lanai Culture and Heritage Center

The struggle to preserve one of the world's most mellifluous, subtle, and elegant languages is front and center in the program's last act. ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, a language once spoken by hundreds of thousands of people, was nearly wiped out after Hawaiʻi became a territory of the United States in 1898: Hawaiian was banned from schools and English became the official language of government. In 1983, fewer than 50 children spoke Hawaiian. But a small group of educators were determined to do something about it.

They began by creating language immersion schools for pre-kindergarten children. They called them punana leos - language nests. The punana leos soon evolved into pre-Kindergarten through 12th grade schools, where every subject was taught in Hawaiian. On the Big Island, Bob visits one of the largest and most comprehensive, Ke Kula ʻO Nāwahīokalaniʻōpuʻu, or Nāwahi, a school with 300 children from pre-K through high school. If Hawaiian has survived into the 21st Century, it is because of Hawaiian schools like Nāwahī. Bob talks to Nāwahī principal Kauanoe Kamanā, language activist Professor Larry Kimura, and one of the first punana leo teachers, Lolena Nicholas. Lolena grew up on the island of Niʻihau where a small Hawaiian population continued speaking Hawaiian in daily life and could teach children with the ease of a native speaker.

Hawaiian is a poetic language, and like all poetry, its words resonate with subtle nuances and buried layers of history. As Kepā Maly, the director of the Lānaʻi Cultural and Heritage Center explains, Hawaiian words evoke centuries-old connections between the Hawaiian people and the natural world. There are hundreds of names for the rain and wind. Puakea Nogelmeier, a Hawaiian language activist and professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa elaborates, as he gives Bob a lesson in Hawaiian: “It takes a different mindset to step into speaking Hawaiian. You have to come into a different world view.”

Most everyone has seen hula, but few people know that hula is in fact an extension of the Hawaiian language. Hawaiians dance hula to a mele, a chant. Kealiʻi Reichel, singer, songwriter, and hula master explains: “Hula cannot exist without the chant. It is one of the very few dance forms that require words.” Nowhere is the Hawaiian spoken word more powerfully felt than in the mele. As Hawaiian has grown stronger, chanting has grown strong along with it. 

If words reflect and shape our experience of the world, what happens when words are lost? Former American poet laureate and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, WS Merwin has lived on the island of Maui for decades, and is deeply concerned with both the natural world and endangered languages. Merwin tells Bob: “As language dies away in culture after culture, the connection with the meaning goes. And when that goes you can never bring it back. When we lose [a language], we’re losing part of ourselves.”

If a language is going to survive, children have to speak it. But to enroll your children in an Hawaiian immersion school is a huge commitment, as Kauʻi Sai-Dudoit, Director of the Hawaiian Language Newspaper Archive, tells Bob: “What I heard a lot was, ‘Why are you doing that? They're not going to make a living out of that.’ But it's not the reason I put them there. I put them there to learn the language of their ancestors so they would have an easier time understanding who they were. For their identity… But when only 5% of us - or 2% or whatever some measly percent of us speak this language, we are far from out of the woods. We are so far from out of the woods yet.”

With languages all over the world in danger of extinction, Bob concludes by reflecting on language and its profound connection to our humanity: “Just as the physical ecology of the earth depends on a healthy interaction among plants and animals, many endangered, there is an ecology of consciousness, an interdependence of knowledge, culture and wisdom we find in and through our languages. Language is a lens through which we see the world. Through language, we become more fully ourselves.”

Watch the full episode on PBS.org