This is also really important:

Anderson says he hopes their documentation efforts will also become a tool to test out linguistic theories. “One of the things that I see myself being able to do,” he explains, “is provide detailed and adequately confirmed phenomena to the general linguistic community and say, ‘here’s some data, now come up with a new theory to explain this data.’”

During filmmaking, Harrison and Anderson discovered an interesting feature of Sora: Its speakers can incorporate definite and specific nouns into a verb, to create, for example, the single-word jo-me-bob-dem-te-n-ei (”I will anoint my head with oil,” or, literally, “smear-oil-head”). This structure goes against prevailing linguistic models, which argue that the incorporated part of the word (i.e., “oil”) should not be available to the external syntax of the phrase, in which the verb is embedded. “Since 80 percent of the world’s languages aren’t documented,” Harrison says, many of the languages they encounter “confound current [linguistic] theories in interesting ways.”

“The fact that these languages are disappearing,” Harrison says, gives him a sense of urgency. “The tipping point has passed for many languages. There’s only one option for them: Record what you can before they disappear.”