How to Kill a Language

by Sophia Smith Galer

Synopsis:

As Sophia Smith Galer’s Nonna lay dying, she realised it wasn’t just a beloved grandmother she was losing – it was the language she spoke, too. From Northern Italy, she spoke a dialët that Sophia, like so many children and grandchildren of migrants, can understand but can’t speak. With the death of the language, Sophia would lose a culture, a history, an inheritance – a whole world.

This tragedy reaches far beyond her family. Globally we are witnessing an unprecedented mass extinction event. By the end of this century half of the world’s 7000 languages will be gone, killed by war, climate breakdown, migration, nationalism or neglect, along with the vital knowledge that they have sustained for centuries.

Smith Galer has journeyed across continents and generations to report from this disappearing world. From Ghana to Greece, Ecuador to Oman, California to the UK, she meets people experiencing this loss at first hand – but also campaigners and linguists who prove that a multilingual future is still possible. Her travels ultimately lead her back to where she began: to Italy, and the tiny mountainside village where the church bells still ring out for her Nonna.

How to Kill a Language is a vital investigation into a hidden global crisis, and a call to speak, read and write the languages of our world, before it’s too late.

Sophia Smith Galer’s How to Kill a Language digs into various language examples to discuss “linguicide”, which encompasses both deliberate/official attempts to suppress a language, and de facto suppression of a language via neglect and heavy pushing of a lingua franca. She chooses various languages to illustrate her points, including her own family’s language (of Italian origin), Ladino, Ukrainian, Dagbani, Kichwa, Hebrew, and more.

The language which haunts the whole book but never gets a chapter of its own is Welsh, which obviously I have feelings about. It’s referenced multiple times, and sometimes when it’s not referenced it’s glaring: there’s no reference to Brad y Llyfrau Gleision or the Welsh Not, and it’s only in the afterword that it gets discussed at any length at all — despite the fact that it exemplifies several of the themes she discusses.

Obviously, Welsh is my own particular axe to grind: I can hardly speak a word of it, beyond “good morning”, “thank you”, “I like books” (thanks to Duolingo, dw i’n hoffi llyfrau) and counting to ten. Even had my parents spoken Welsh, which they don’t, it simply wasn’t an option for me to learn in school due to growing up in England. Even when I went to university in Wales, I’d hear disdain for the Welsh language far too often. So the fact that Sophia Smith Galer doesn’t dedicate much time to it cuts at me when I can see how it would’ve been perfect, but your mileage will necessarily vary on that: you might feel similar about the omission of discussion of Gaelic or your own ancestral language, or feel that the points are covered by the languages that do merit a chapter…

And that’s fair. Welsh isn’t any more special than other languages; it’s just a certain kind of experience to read this as a non-Welsh speaking Welsh person (sometimes considered by other Welsh people to not really be Welsh because of it) and not have my language represented fully when it’s so vital to me, and I can see the experiences of Welsh people including my own in the issues raised about other languages.

That said, in a way that enhanced reading this book, because I do have a personal understanding of it, and found the topic interesting and vital. Sophia Smith Galer writes clearly and emotively, the depth of her research is clear, and I think it’s overall a great book — if sometimes a sad one.

It seems apropos to close here with the words of Dafydd Iwan: Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth, ry‘n ni yma o hyd.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)