The Amazon Code

In a remote region of the Amazon live the last 300 members of the Pirahã tribe. They have one of the strangest languages in the world: they have no words for colours and numbers, no concern for the past nor the future – making it one of the hottest debates ever among linguists!

In the 1970s, Daniel Everett first met the Pirahã as a Christian missionary exploring the Amazon basin. Having converted no one, Everett was soon much less interested in Jesus than the people with whom he was now living.

For 30 years, he attempted to understand the near indecipherable Pirahã language - once described by the New Yorker as ‘a profusion of songbirds’, ‘melodic chattering’, and ‘barely discernible as speech’ - and re-invented himself as a linguist, grabbing headlines by challenging Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar.

In this documentary, we will follow Everett as he sets out to gather evidence to support his controversial theories.