How to Kill a Language is written from the heart. Sophia Smith Galer is a British journalist who holds a degree in Spanish and Arabic, and whose family, living in North London, provides a textbook case of how language disappears. At home, Galer’s nonna/grandmother often spoke a variety of Emigliän, one of thirty languages (not dialects) that survive in pockets of the Italian peninsula; she would converse in it with her daughter, Galer’s mother. But there it stopped. Standard Italian was still spoken in the household, but her grandmother’s tongue had gone. Galer states that this is a common pattern among immigrants: the first generation cleave to their language (specially if it’s a minority one), the second are usually bilingual, while the third — the most assimilated — may function in the host country’s language alone.
“I have travelled the world in an attempt to expose… linguicide,” she writes. The result is a polemical book, the intent apparent in the ironic title. But How to Kill a Language is carefully researched, written with flair, and illuminated by personal encounters. The last few pages, when Galer returns to her nonna’s mountain village, are particularly effective. There she hears a church bell tolling, and learns that the villagers mark somebody’s passing (wherever they are) whenever the news reaches them. Although that person might have left thirty years ago, they are not forgotten. Blood ties are particularly important in Italy, in fact the basis of Italian citizenship.
The book is basically a series of case studies. “All languages belong to all of us,” Galer declares. She starts with Italian in England, and swiftly moves to Oman. There a very old Semitic language, Sheret, is being bulldozed by Arabic, as part of a drastic policy of modernisation. But there’s fightback: once unwritten (no need), Sheret was given an alphabet by linguists to supplement the Arabic one. Now it can even be used on a smart phone, using a modified Arabic keyboard.
In Kyiv there stands a linguicide memorial — one of the very few in the world exclusively designed to remember the killing of a language. Indeed, Ukraine and Ukrainian have suffered a discontinuous onslaught from Russia for centuries. It seems forgotten now, but people in Tsarist Russia regularly referred to the people as Little Russians — so Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony, drawing on Ukrainian themes, came to be known as the “Little Russian.” Ukrainian is not a dialect of Russian; as Galer points out, while they are of the same Slavonic family, “linguistically, they are aunt and niece, and linguists do not consider them to be varieties of the same language.” Indeed some 38 per cent of the vocabulary is different. Stalin made it policy to execute “Ukrainising” intellectuals, and Ukrainian was made a state language only in 1989 — the year the Berlin wall came down.
In the conflict since 2014, Russia has been eradicating Ukrainian systematically in occupied districts — closing Ukrainian newspapers, television, websites. Even songs sung in Ukrainian are banned. Schools teach in Russian only. But on social media the defence and growth of Ukrainian has been decisive: up from 15 per cent of personal posts in 2020 to some 51 per cent in 2023. People still want to speak a second language. But now it’s English, not Russian. (Volodymyr Zelensky, a native Russian speaker, has himself made the change to Ukrainian.)
Resistance and reaffirmation of language has occurred elsewhere, notably among Jewish people. But there have been serious reverses. Thessaloniki once had the largest Jewish community in Greece — before 94 per cent of them were murdered in the Holocaust. The language they spoke, Ladino, can sound like fifteenth-century Spanish, for they had fled Spain when the only alternative was conversion to Christianity. It is rarely heard now. Only a handful of speakers are left in Salonika, though there are some in America and Israel. Recently the Spanish government has been involved in recuperating Ladino, allied with its program of extending citizenship to proven descendants of those expelled at the time of the Inquisition.
Hebrew, however, is the great success story. It had been nobody’s mother tongue since ancient times. The Jews of mittel Europa spoke Yiddish, along with the language of the nation state they lived in; Hebrew was the language of the Torah, heard only in a religious context, delivered by a master reader skilled in the language’s inflections. It did develop a literature, but as Galer writes, it is the only language in history that has been successfully raised from the dead. Hebrew’s modern, broader application was pioneered by the Zionist Ben-Yehuda, on going to Palestine; it caught on, mostly for ideological reasons, as the greater number of Jewish immigrants were Yiddish speakers. It is now the language of Israel, Arabic in 2018 having been demoted from being the country’s co-official language. Arabic is permitted to be spoken in the Knesset, but its utterance is vigorously opposed.
Galer has chapters on the struggles of the Amerindian language Karuk in California, of Kichwa in Ecuador, of Dagbani in Ghana (its plight made worse by climate change). But the case of the Kurds is worth particular attention. Colonial-era boundaries split Kurdistan between four Middle Eastern countries: the language has been under attack across the board. In Iran the Kurds are caught up in the general discrimination and violence experienced by minorities. These people are seen as fissures in the state, undermining national security. In Turkey, persecution of Kurdish is enshrined in its constitution and legal system (although it is the home language of one-fifth of the population). In 1983, Turkey passed a law banning Kurdish in both private and public life. Around the time the Kurdistan Workers Party announced its dissolution and disarmament in 2025 — ending its long guerilla campaign against Turkey — oppression relaxed a little. But the language is declining in use: in 2019, a survey found that over half of the vital eighteen- to thirty-year-old cohort had little familiarity with Kurdish, and some none at all.
Australia may get no chapter of its own, but Galer is well aware of developments here. She tells us that only one of the original 358 Aboriginal languages has been deemed safe. And yet there is much wisdom encoded within those being lost. Galer cites the case of the sub-fin dolphin, which scientists now recognise as a distinct species. Old hat to the Aborigines: they had differentiated the animal ages ago with a special word. Galer goes on to make the point that the world’s biodiversity hotspots, teeming with the greatest variety of flora and fauna, also host more than 70 per cent of the world’s languages. “We may risk losing the information that may help us preserve such places,” she writes, “if we fail the speakers who have long been their protectors.”
She notes that the Master–Apprenticeship Language Learning Program, pioneered in California, is being applied here too. New learners are paired with fluent speakers, and brought together for at least ten hours a week. But this may not be enough to save a language. The linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann has called for a Native Tongue Title — matching the implementation of land rights, compensating Indigenous groups for the loss of heritage languages caused by colonisation. A broader, national compensation scheme could afford “explicit legal protection” to threatened languages. “Assuming that offering grants instead of laws will save languages,” comments Galer, “is naive at best, and linguistically fatal at worst.”
Meanwhile English sweeps the world. Forty-nine per cent of the world’s top ten million websites are in English. It has been estimated that in the next 100 years, half of the world’s languages will die. (Most of them are not written.) A lot of knowledge will go with them. Galer writes of some Andaman islanders who, from deep cultural knowledge, recognised the signs of a coming disaster and fled to the high ground: none of them died in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. Galer also cites the case of the American ethnobiologist who, because he spoke Samoan, found out about a particular tree’s healing properties: it turned out to contain an enzyme which proved to be vital in treating AIDS patients. Indeed the vast majority of species on land and sea still await formal scientific description and analysis. And the key to their identification and properties will often lie — dormant — in Indigenous languages.
Thomas Macaulay’s famous minute (1835), written to determine the nature of education policy in India, urged the cessation of support for indigenous language education. Instead, he wrote, the aim should be to produce English-speakers who would be “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” Partly this stand was induced by what was seen as an urgent need to modernise the country. But more usually punishing children in schools for speaking their home language was an assertion of imperial power — from the Celtic lands of the British Isles to, very likely, occupied Ukraine. In South Africa the attempt to stamp out Afrikaans had a particularly deadly effect, fuelling an ardent Afrikaner nationalism that would impose the rigours of apartheid.
In the north of Ghana, the drying effect of climate change is forcing people to migrate from a linguistically rich region to the south. Many languages are lost or severely threatened in the process. One of the most pervasive — taken up by other migrant groups — has no government support. Those in power deem language issues relatively unimportant, since they have to govern a country that may have one of the fastest-growing economies in the world but also has 24 per cent of the population still living below the poverty line. Within multilingual classrooms, it is English which emerges foremost, as it is the global lingua franca of STEM. No African language appears on more than 0.1 per cent of websites.
A reverse approach is now needed. Languages are lost so easily: Galer tells us that some twenty years ago more than half of 5000 second-generation immigrant students in South Florida and Southern California had lost their heritage language. (In Florida, not even the proximity of Cuba stemmed the tide.) A Canadian study revealed that communities where Indigenous people could, as the majority, converse freely in their own language, had low to zero youth suicide rates. In communities where fewer than half could speak their language, suicide rates were six times higher.
In England, Galer points out, only three schools in every 500 have whole-school policies that address foreign languages. Different minorities could be catered for by involving a set of schools, each teaching a different language. In her mind is the example of progressive Sweden, where if one child comes from a household where a heritage language is spoken, and four other children and a teacher can be found to participate in formal classes, they will qualify for recognition in the national school system. More generally, women, as mothers, have a particular part to play. Studies have shown that new-born babies are highly sensitive to the language they don’t yet speak: their cries can mimic its melodic qualities.
A language’s health is intimately connected with the tolerance and encouragement of multiculturalism, as surely as it needs the sustaining influence of its own community, enjoying full civic rights. UNESCO has declared this the Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–32). And, says Galer, we should all learn a second language ourselves. (But not with the attitude of the Emperor Charles V, who fatefully said, “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.”) Research shows that acquiring foreign languages, even as adults, gives us a deeper understanding of how language works, improving our communication skills. Still — despite Appalling Hanson — we have come a long way since the 1950s. Then, people on a tram might show their displeasure when a “New Australian” couple dared to conduct a conversation in their own language. •
How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words
By Sophia Smith Galer | William Collins | $34.99 | 289 pages
