Watch Mesmerizing Model Tongue-Twisters

Photographer Elle Muliarchyk — whose Dressing Room Project, in which she ventured into the dressing rooms of high-end stores to pull off ambitious guerilla self-portraits, is well worth checking out — made a great short film in which two dozen models say tongue-twisters in their native languages. She cut this exclusive clip for Jezebel.

Dinka, Ukrainian, German, Dutch, Mandarin, Nuer, French, Igbo, Czech, Hungarian, Arabic — the sounds of the various languages, and the cultural differences between the tongue-twisters themselves, are really cool. Plus I happen to find the ultra-close-up shots of the girls’ lipsticked mouths kind of hypnotizing. A Polish tongue-twister is about nature: “The frogs creak in Rzeszowszczyznie in the rain and can be heard all the way to Ustrzyk, earth worms wiggle in Kurpiowszczyznie and in the jungle the owl squeaks.” The Lithuanian tongue-twister, “A bowl floats in a pond, a bit of foam floats in the bowl,” is almost a hard to say in English, too (or at least, the “foam floats” bit is). Muliarchyk was born in Belarus and grew up in Vietnam, the Czech Republic, and the U.S. (her father was a diplomat). Perhaps that background fueled her interest in languages and culture. You can watch all of the tongue-twisters here.

UPDATE: There was a problem with our exclusive clip, so I swapped in another version of the short video.

Lips of Babel [Motilo.com]