Movie: American Tongues

  • HomePage

    American Tongues

  • Overview

    Rich in humor and regional color, this sometimes hilarious film uses the prism of language to reveal our attitudes about the way other people speak. From Boston Brahmins to Black Louisiana teenagers, from Texas cowboys to New York professionals, American Tongues elicits funny, perceptive, sometimes shocking, and always telling comments on American English in all its diversity. (PBS)

  • Release Date

    1987-06-24

  • Average

    7

  • Rating:

    3.5 starts
  • Tagline

    A film about the way we talk

  • Genres

  • Languages:

    English
  • Keywords

Recommendations Movies

Jennifer Lopez: The Reel Me
87%

Jennifer Lopez: The Reel Me(en)

2003-02-25

As the entertainment industry's biggest tabloid draw, Jennifer Lopez has had successful careers in multiple fields. Here, Lopez showcases her career as a pop singer with every one of her music videos to date -- from her debut, "If You Had My Love," to her latest release, "Baby I Love You." J. Lo also enhances the collection by providing personal commentary to each video, including how the ideas came to light and which videos she likes best.

Don Camillo's Last Round
72%

Don Camillo's Last Round(it)

1955-09-29

Bewildered, Don Camillo learns that Peppone intends to stand for parliament. Determined to thwart his ambitions, the good priest, ignoring the recommendations of the Lord, decides to campaign against him.

The Pariah
72%

The Pariah(fr)

1972-12-12

For more than 15 years, two Marseille friends and criminals battle the law, rival gangs, prison authorities and even mined beaches in order to survive.

Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles
52%

Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles(en)

2001-04-12

After settling in the tiny Australian town of Walkabout Creek with his significant other and his young son, Mick "Crocodile" Dundee is thrown for a loop when a prestigious Los Angeles newspaper offers his honey a job. The family migrates back to the United States, and Croc and son soon find themselves learning some lessons about American life -- many of them inadvertent

Throne of Blood
79%

Throne of Blood(ja)

1957-01-15

Returning to their lord's castle, samurai warriors Washizu and Miki are waylaid by a spirit who predicts their futures. When the first part of the spirit's prophecy comes true, Washizu's scheming wife, Asaji, presses him to speed up the rest of the spirit's prophecy by murdering his lord and usurping his place. Director Akira Kurosawa's resetting of William Shakespeare's "Macbeth" in feudal Japan is one of his most acclaimed films.

Cousin Ben Troop Screening
63%

Cousin Ben Troop Screening(en)

2012-06-19

Cousin Ben hosts a screening of Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom to the troops.

Box
45%

Box(en)

2022-06-23

A doomsday pepper is surprised to find a mysterious box appear in his living room with no trace as to how it could've gotten there.

French Fried Vacations 3: Friends Forever
41%

French Fried Vacations 3: Friends Forever(fr)

2006-02-01

After the Club Med and skiing, what happened to the Bronzés 27 years later? Early response: the same, and worse.

The Brain
73%

The Brain(fr)

1969-03-07

Arthur and Anatole are two little robbers. They want to rob money, money that will travel in a special train from Paris to Bruxelles. They don't know that other people have planned to do the same thing.

Zabriskie Point
71%

Zabriskie Point(en)

1970-03-26

Anthropology student Daria, who's helping a property developer build a village in the Los Angeles desert, and dropout Mark, who's wanted by the authorities for allegedly killing a policeman during a student riot, accidentally encounter each other in Death Valley and soon begin an unrestrained romance.

Cemetery of Splendor
58%

Cemetery of Splendor(th)

2015-09-02

In a hospital, ten soldiers are being treated for a mysterious sleeping sickness. In a story in which dreams can be experienced by others, and in which goddesses can sit casually with mortals, a nurse learns the reason why the patients will never be cured, and forms a telepathic bond with one of them.

The Naked City
72%

The Naked City(en)

1948-03-04

The Naked City portrays the police investigation that follows the murder of a young model. A veteran cop is placed in charge of the case and he sets about, with the help of other beat cops and detectives, finding the girl's killer.

Around the World in Eighty Days
66%

Around the World in Eighty Days(en)

1956-10-17

Based on the famous book by Jules Verne the movie follows Phileas Fogg on his journey around the world. Which has to be completed within 80 days, a very short period for those days.

Bronco Billy
64%

Bronco Billy(en)

1980-06-11

An idealistic, modern-day cowboy struggles to keep his Wild West show afloat in the face of hard luck and waning interest.

Open Season 3
56%

Open Season 3(en)

2010-10-21

Boog, Elliot, and their forest friends return with an all-new adventure, this time in a Big Top Circus! The comedy begins when Boog's pals choose their family obligations over the annual guy's trip, and a disappointed Boog decides to take a trip of his own, which leads him right into the middle of a circus ring...literally. When he switches places with a devious look-a-like circus grizzly and falls for an alluring Russian troupe member, he'll come to realize that maybe you don't have to choose between family and friendship after all.

Flatfoot in Hong Kong
61%

Flatfoot in Hong Kong(it)

1975-03-28

Inspector Rizzo is accused of drug trafficking. In order to clear his name he has to find out who is the person, from a Mafia ring, who has infiltrated his police department.

Police
59%

Police(fr)

1985-09-04

Mangin, a police inspector in Paris, leans hard on informants to get evidence on three Tunisian brothers who traffic in drugs. He arrests one, Simon, and his girl-friend Noria. Simon's brothers go to their lawyer. He springs Noria, who promptly steals 2 million francs that belong to the Tunisians. They suspect her of the theft; her life as well as the lawyer's is in danger. Meanwhile, Noria is playing with both the lawyer and Mangin's affections. Mangin is mercurial anyway: intimidating and bloodying suspects, falling for a police commission trainee before flipping for Noria, wearing his emotions on his sleeve. Can he save the lawyer and Noria, and can he convince her to love?

Main Hoon Na
67%

Main Hoon Na(hi)

2004-04-30

An army major goes undercover as a college student. His mission is both professional and personal: to protect his general's daughter from a radical militant, and to find his estranged half-brother.

Senso
72%

Senso(it)

1954-12-30

A troubled and neurotic Italian Countess betrays her entire country for a self-destructive love affair with an Austrian Lieutenant.

My New Partner
66%

My New Partner(fr)

1984-09-19

A streetwise Paris policeman who takes kickbacks from the minor criminals on his beat to allow them to continue is assigned an idealistic new partner fresh from police academy. He sets out to corrupt him...

Similar Movies

Aranzazú, a memory of ruins
0%

Aranzazú, a memory of ruins(es)

2012-04-05

The celebration of a city is held every year and nostalgia is the main guest. Around the city there is nothing but ruins and in the distance, four men walk the streets of a city that was once great.

Omegäng
0%

Omegäng(de)

2024-01-19

How is our dialect faring in the globalized age? When the "railroad age" began 160 years ago, Switzerland feared that High German would supplant the dialect. The opposite has happened. The dialect persists and continues to blossom.

Marc Okrand on Klingon
0%

Marc Okrand on Klingon(en)

2002-01-01

Marc Okrand discusses his involvement with the Star Trek franchise and his work on inventing the Klingon and Vulcan languages.

Talkers
0%

Talkers(lv)

2016-11-08

The three speakers represent two of the dialects, with the most common one - the middle dialect spoken in Riga and central parts of Latvia - not featured in the film. In intimate surroundings, a farmer, a schoolteacher, and a herder of ostriches talk about perceived differences between Latvian speakers, and about language policy and their lives.

Project Nim
68%

Project Nim(en)

2011-07-08

From the team behind Man on Wire comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. Following Nim's extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, the film is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal we tried to make human. What we learn about his true nature - and indeed our own - is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.

Do I Sound Gay?
57%

Do I Sound Gay?(en)

2015-07-10

What makes a voice “gay”? A breakup with his boyfriend sets journalist David Thorpe on a quest to unravel a linguistic mystery.

To Save a Language
0%

To Save a Language(et)

2020-11-20

Linguist Indrek Park has been working with Native American languages for over ten years. The film sees him recording the language of the Mandan tribe, who live in the prairies of North Dakota, on the banks of the Missouri River. The job involves a lot of responsibility, and he is running out of time – his language guide, the 84-year-old Edwin Benson, is the last native speaker of Mandan.

Treno di parole, viaggio nella poesia di Raffaello Baldini
0%

Treno di parole, viaggio nella poesia di Raffaello Baldini(it)

2018-10-20

The œuvre of poet Raffaello Baldini (1924-2005) through the words of those who knew him, the poems he himself read, the fragments of his monologues, his beloved Romagna landscapes.

Yeah You Rite!
80%

Yeah You Rite!(en)

1985-01-20

This award winning film is a fast paced, humorous look at the colorful way the residents of New Orleans express themselves - why they talk the way they do, where the words come from, and what it means to talk with a New Orleans accent.

Piz Regolith
60%

Piz Regolith(de)

2020-12-12

A postmodern Swiss-Tyrolean ensemble ventures into remote mountainous regions, embracing the sonorous variety of local vernaculars. A poetic road movie with stunning shots and an emphatic approach to a new alpine aesthetics.

The Unanswered Question III : Musical Semantics
90%

The Unanswered Question III : Musical Semantics(en)

1976-01-11

This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse:Semantics is the study of meaning in language, and Bernstein's third lecture, "musical semantics", accordingly, is Bernstein's first attempt to explain meaning in music. Although Bernstein defines musical semantics as "meaning, both musical and extramusical" this lecture focuses exclusively on the "musical" version of meaning.

The Unanswered Question IV : The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity
90%

The Unanswered Question IV : The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity(en)

1976-01-11

This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse: Bernstein provides two distinct meanings of the term ambiguity. The first is "doubtful or uncertain" and the second, "capable of being understood in two or more possible senses"

The Unanswered Question V : The Twentieth Century Crisis
90%

The Unanswered Question V : The Twentieth Century Crisis(en)

1976-01-11

This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse: Lecture 5 picks up at the early twentieth century with an oncoming crisis in Western Music. As these lectures have traced the gradual increase and oversaturation of ambiguity, Bernstein now designates a point in history that took ambiguity too far.

The Unanswered Question VI : The Poetry of Earth
90%

The Unanswered Question VI : The Poetry of Earth(en)

1976-01-11

This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse: This lecture takes its name from a line in John Keats' poem, "On the Grasshopper and Cricket". Bernstein does not discuss Keats' poem directly in this chapter, but he provides his own definition of the poetry of earth, which is tonality. Tonality is the poetry of earth because of the phonological universals discussed in lecture 1. This lecture discusses predominantly Stravinsky, whom Bernstein considers the poet of earth.

K'anech'oxdekdiigh: I'm Not Going to Teach You
0%

K'anech'oxdekdiigh: I'm Not Going to Teach You(en)

2006-05-15

The collaboration between the Tanacross and Northway, Alaska communities and trained linguistic specialists from the Alaska Native Language Center to keep their native language from disappearing. And the continuation of the tangential community effort of preserving their language and culture by teaching and using them at home and in schools and in their lives.

CodeSwitching
0%

CodeSwitching(en)

2019-06-24

CodeSwitching is a mash-up of personal stories from three generations of African American students who participated in a landmark voluntary desegregation program. Shuttling between their inner-city Boston neighborhoods and predominantly white suburban schools in pursuit of a better education, they find themselves swapping elements of culture, language, and behavior to fit in with their suburban counterparts – Often acting or speaking differently based on their surroundings, called code-switching.

The Grammar of Happiness
80%

The Grammar of Happiness(en)

2012-01-25

The Grammar Of Happiness follows the story of Daniel Everett among the extraordinary 'nonconvertible' Amazonian Pirah tribe, a group of indigenous hunter- gatherers whose culture and outlook on life has taken the world of linguistics by storm. As a young ambitious missionary three decades ago, Dan, a red-bearded towering American, decamped to the Amazon rain forest to save indigenous souls. His assignment was to translate the book of Mark into the tongue of the Pirah, a people whose puzzling speech seemed unrelated to any other on Earth. What he learned during his time with the Pirah led him to question the very foundations of his own deep beliefs. As a 'born again' atheist, Dan divorced his devout Christian wife and became estranged from his children. Having lost faith and family, his new life is dominated by the desire to leave behind his legacy. Everett's most controversial claim is that the Pirah language lacks 'recursion' - the ability to build an infinite number of sentences.

We Will Speak
100%

We Will Speak(en)

2023-03-23

The Cherokee language is deeply tied to Cherokee identity; yet generations of assimilation efforts by the U.S. government and anti-Indigenous stigmas have forced the Tri-Council of Cherokee tribes to declare a State of Emergency for the language in 2019. While there are 430,000 Cherokee citizens in the three federally recognized tribes, fewer than an estimated 2,000 fluent speakers remain—the majority of whom are elderly. The covid pandemic has unfortunately hastened the course. Language activists, artists, and the youth must now lead the charge of urgent radical revitalization efforts to help save the language from the brink of extinction.

The Unanswered Question I : Musical Phonology
90%

The Unanswered Question I : Musical Phonology(en)

1976-01-11

This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse: Phonology is the linguistic study of sounds, or phonemes. Bernstein's application of this term to music results in what he calls "musical phonology".