Linguistics 

In the documentary The Linguists, linguists David Harrison and Greg Anderson travel to document endangered languages. One example in the film is "Chulym", a Turkic language spoken by a small number of elderly speakers in Siberia, Russia. In one scene, the linguists record a speaker who is one of the last fluent users of the language. The urgency is clear, once that generation passes, the language could disappear. This directly parallels what happened to the Tunxis language. Without intergenerational transmission, languages decline rapidly among their people.