Paramount Seeks To Leverage Linguistic Capital
SpecGram Wire Services
Attempting to leverage the success of its Klingon monopoly, Star Trek owner Paramount Pictures has been making aggressive advances on the world’s minority languages.
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Rasmus Rask, voted the most eligible bachelor in Philology in 1926 and 1927, sits coyly to one side of the Welcoming Tent, watching all the pretty young Anthropologists walk by while
at the 1929 Annual International Men of Philology/Women of Anthropology Multidisciplinary Mixer, held at a private beach resort in Galveston, Texas.
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Offers for majority ownership of such diverse languages as Eastern Yugur, Basque, and Mofu are reported by knowledgeable sources as running well into the tens of millions of US dollars.
Yule University’s Dr. Mark Whale, director of the Endangered Linguistic Systems Fund, says that Paramount’s move has both advantages and disadvantages. Dr. Whale told our reporter “while there is no guarantee that a media corporation would actually promote language preservation, at least the sale of linguistic rights gives these communities some capital to work with in planning for their own indigenous linguistic development.”
A well-placed Hollywood insider declined to speculate on Paramount’s future plans, but did note that having a wide range of natural languages at its disposal might give the studio an advantage over its competitors in the Sci-Fi genre, which is widely expected to be the main source of film capital over the next few years, as public interest in romantic comedies and action films seems to be waning. “Any studio exec who could control a significant percentage of the world’s non-major linguistic systems might expect to reduce costs for alien language development, which currently constitute nearly 35% of the budget of every Star Trek feature.”
Paramount spokesmen, even when approached by an undercover reporter under a different pretense, declined to comment on the studio’s current linguistic rights holdings.
