Pole-to-Pole With Will Smith is National Geographic’s newest documentary series, premiered on January 14 on Disney+ and Hulu. The mini-series follows actor Will Smith to all corners of the globe as he spends 100 days overcoming a variety of challenges your average person could only dream of experiencing. In doing so, and in exploring the big questions in life, Will is supported by a variety of experts in a large assortment of fields. One of the experts featured in Pole-to-Pole with Will Smith is Dr. Mary Walworth, a linguistics expert in Oceanic languages. She earned her doctorate from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and went on to head the Comparative Oceanic Linguistics project at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and most recently has been working as a research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. 

Dr. Walworth specializes in Oceanic languages, particularly those that have developed in somewhat remote island communities. I got the opportunity to speak with her about her work and her experience working on Pole-to-Pole. 

SARAH: How did you get involved with Pole-to-Pole? 

DR. MARY WALWORTH: I was contacted as a Pacific languages expert and language documentation expert, and they told me about the project and asked if I was interested, and there was no doubt in my mind. As you likely know, […] language science doesn’t get a big platform like this very often, and the subject of endangered languages, definitely, even less, so it was such an opportunity to be able to bring that into the public eye.

SARAH: Have you found there to be overarching concepts that apply across the board? Are these languages evolving kind of independently of each other? 

DR. MARY WALWORTH: I think it’s  both. When you’re dealing with a big language family and in the case of a place like Papua New Guinea, you’re dealing with multiple language families, 22 different language families that are  living side by side, and possibly more, you are definitely encountering some themes linguistically and culturally that float through an entire family of languages. Being that the Pacific languages, the Oceanic languages, are all mostly on islands, you have a lot of themes related to  the ocean and a lot of oral histories that relate to the ocean and relate to certain crops that you find only in that zone.

But these languages also evolve in their own ways and in different directions. You have languages in Polynesia […] I worked with a language that has probably the fewest consonants in the entire world. Then you’ve got another language in Vanuatu that has a sound that’s only in 0.01% of the world’s languages. So you’ve got both, but these languages also evolve in their own ways and in different directions.

SARAH: The evolution of language and the evolution of communication is really interesting to me, especially in terms of [what] you were talking about [with] the dying languages. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of preserving those languages, and what could someone like me do to help? 

DR. MARY WALWORTH: Sure. So first, the importance of the preservation of language. It goes at a number of levels. The first thing and probably the major thing that I want to convey through this show is that language is not just a tool for communication, right? Language is encoding lots of different knowledge and it’s this anchor to our history, our sort of collective history, so, documenting these languages and recording them is critically important.

What could somebody like you do, um, to get involved? There’s smaller organizations that definitely need funding, and that kind of thing. Also getting involved at the ground level wherever you live […] there’s probably  endangered languages or heritage languages if the languages are already sort of far gone. 

Talk to those associations or language groups and see if there’s something you can do to get involved, to talk to those associations or language groups and see if there’s something you can do to get involved to help record languages, help archive languages, contact linguists like myself, follow up  and follow our research and our adventures.

I think, you know, the more people are able to personalize it, the more they understand the importance of it.

SARAH: With your position, when you’re leading the Comparative Oceanic Linguistics Project, what projects are your researchers currently working on now? What can we expect to see coming out of that?

DR. MARY WALWORTH: I founded that group and I led the COOL group – Comparative Oceanic Linguistics – for quite some time. I am now in the French research system with the CIS, so still very involved with the COOL group, but that is kind of winding down, and as it winds down, a lot of our projects are coming out.

Our research has included my own, and our whole group has  included a lot of documentation in the Pacific region. So we have databases where you can go and actually listen to these languages and do some comparison yourself, and listen to how these languages sound, what words are important to these cultures and these speech communities.

We have research coming out about some of these rare sounds that I spoke about. It’s a great sound. It’s called a bilabial trill. It sounds like this. [Demonstrates the bilabial trill].  That’s one of the sounds that we’ve worked on, and talking about where does a sound like that come from.

That’s some of our research and one of the big major pillars of my own research  and of course also that of COOL was, and is, using language to map back migration patterns, [and] contact networks. I work a lot with archaeologists and geneticists to kind of reconstruct the story of the past.

SARAH: What are you hoping that viewers will take away from your segment of the show? 

DR. MARY WALWORTH: I think again, the biggest thing is that linguistic diversity matters, and that language isn’t just this tool for communication. Everything we say tells something about who we are, who we want to be, where we come from, and that’s everybody. Whether it’s an endangered language or a major language, the way you speak tells so much and it tells a story and that matters.

Dr. Mary Walworth can be seen in ‘Pole-to-Pole with Will Smith,’ now streaming on Disney+. 

This interview has been edited for clarity.