"Hi! I, uh... have someone here who speaks a language, that..."

It strikes him that "a language we don't know" is marginally less likely to be immediately captivating to linguistics researchers than "a physics we don't know" was to physicists. How to get a foot in the door...?

"She... let's just start with... I don't know where on Earth it's from, and, let's say I need help identifying it."