Arte - The Amazon Code (2012)

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, making it one of the hottest debates ever among linguists.

In the 1970s, Christian missionary Daniel Everett first met the Pirahã while exploring the Amazon basin. 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 Chomskys theory of universal grammar.