Sophia Smith Galler’s How to Kill a Language introduces the many methods that are used to coerce people into taking up dominant languages at the expense of their own. These include massacres, dispossession, forced relocation, criminalisation and public humiliation, as well as more subtle techniques, like economic pressure and political indifference.
Each chapter of How to Kill a Language takes a close look at one of these techniques and tells the story of how it has been used against a specific community.
Review: How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words – Sophie Smith Galler (HarperCollins)
Smith Galer takes readers to Oman, Greece, Ecuador, the United States and Ghana to visit communities that are working to defend their languages. To learn about conflict zones that were too dangerous to visit, she speaks to experts like Ukraine’s language commissioner Taras Kremin and Kurdish academic Farangis Ghaderi.
She combines stories from these people and places with her own family’s story of assimilation as migrants in the United Kingdom.
The intimacy of these stories and Smith Galer’s personal connection to them sets her book apart from previous endangered languages travelogues, such as Last Speakers (2010) by linguist David K. Harrison and Spoken Here (2003) by journalist Mark Abley.
Smith Galer’s book is also set apart from an earlier generation of writing about language loss by its clear focus on the political dimension of the problem.
The first popular books on language loss, such as Language Death (2000) by linguist David Crystal and Vanishing Voices (2000) by cognitive scientist Daniel Nettle and linguist Suzanne Romaine, did not avoid discussion of politics. But their political analysis was often hidden behind biological metaphors that compared oppressed languages to endangered species. They also tended to offer technical solutions rather than political ones.
Since these books were published, criticism of their depoliticised approach has grown. Academic researchers and language activists increasingly acknowledge that political change is essential to combating language loss.
These perspectives have only recently begun reaching wider audiences. This is seen in books such as Speak Not (2021) by journalist James Griffiths and Language City by linguist Ross Perlin (2024).
In How to Kill a Language, Smith Galer is thus using her keen storytelling talents and sharp analytical vision to build on the work of researchers, activists and other journalists who have argued that global language loss is a political problem requiring political solutions.
Defending linguistic assimilation
The broad interest in How to Kill a Language and the praise it has received are evidence that Smith Galer has done this successfully. But the backlash against the book also suggests how much still needs to be done to shift public opinion.
This backlash is clearly seen in a recent response to Smith Galer’s book in the New Yorker. Written by philosopher Nikhil Krishnan and published under the title Sometimes, It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die, the review’s arguments are depressingly familiar to anyone who knows the long history of research and advocacy around global language loss.
Krishnan recycles old arguments that ignore decades of research. His views echo, for example, this article from linguist Peter Ladefoged, written in 1992 as a response to a position statement from several prominent linguists about the importance of tackling the problem of global language loss. They are also remarkably similar to an article by political commentator Kenan Malik titled Let Them Die, written in response to the book Vanishing Voices.
All three articles argue that language loss is the result of individual choice, not collective coercion. Krishnan tells us that Indigenous people shift languages in order to seek better employment opportunities. Malik says that “most languages die out, not because they are suppressed, but because native speakers yearn for a better life”.
Ladefoged tells two stories about people who chose to teach a dominant language to their children, then warns his readers: “We should not assume that we know what is best for them.”
Language loss is not a choice
Researchers have known since the 1950s that language loss involves an element of choice. The problem is figuring out how much choice.
Smith Galer describes how people have impossible choices forced upon them. In the US, Native Americans could choose to speak their languages in residential schools, but this meant choosing to be beaten. In Oman, speakers of minority languages can choose to speak their language, but this means choosing to be poor.
In 1953, in one of the earliest pieces of research on language loss, the linguist Uriel Weinreich said the key challenge was to understand “the pressures that determine the choice of language”.
Some of those pressures are extreme. A 1948 article by linguist Morris Swadesh that discussed the “disappearance of languages” referred to the hunting and massacres of Indigenous people, forced removals and slavery. Eighty years of research confirms that violence and terror are widespread methods of driving language loss.
So, language loss is often a reluctant choice made to escape violence, not a willing choice made to gain benefits.
Language loss is not inevitable
Another key argument in Krishnan’s review is that language loss is “just how things go”. He claims that languages have a natural life cycle: they “emerge, spread, splinter, standardize, contract, and disappear”. Ladefoged makes a similar point when he says that “different cultures are always dying while new ones arise”. Malik alludes to the inevitability of language loss, claiming that some languages are “unpreservable”.
These arguments all suggest that because language loss is natural, intervening is useless.
Smith Galer argues that “it is not the norm across human history for languages to disappear so rapidly”. Research backs her up. For example, a recent study published in Science argues that global linguistic diversity probably peaked around 3,000 to 1,000 years ago.
Claire Bowern, one of the article’s authors, points out that this decline has coincided with “the rise of large states and multinational empires”.
This has implications for how we understand today’s global language loss. “It’s not inevitable that endangered languages become extinct,” Bowern argues, because “political currents don’t have to move in one direction.” Weinreich made the same point in 1953, when he said,
Many ‘obsolescent’ languages have received new leases on life […] and have made the prediction of the death of languages a hazardous business.
So, language loss is not inevitable, because it is driven by political currents that humans can shape.
Linguistic diversity is not harmful
Krishnan also criticises Smith Galer’s book with the argument that linguistic diversity is harmful. He alludes vaguely to unspecified “risks” of multilingualism and suggests that some languages might contain inaccurate information or illiberal ideas. He also claims that investing resources to support languages might take money away from building hospitals.
This last argument echoes Ladefoged’s concern that language maintenance might take money away tuberculosis eradication (he also worries it will undermine economic development). Malik claims that linguistic diversity creates barriers to social interaction and reduces openness to new ideas.
Krishnan, Malik and Ladefoged provide no evidence to support these claims. They are simply expressing a shared political position, with imagined scenarios that sound vaguely reasonable.
But the evidence is clearly on Smith Galer’s side. When Krishnan and Ladefoged suggest that supporting languages might undermine health, they are overlooking a long line of arguments that assert a link between the support of minority languages and the health and wellbeing of people who use them.
For example, Rudolf Virchow, one of the founders of contemporary public health, argued in 1848 that the health of Polish-speaking subjects of Prussia could be improved by providing them education and health services in their language.
Research has backed up what was essentially a hunch for Virchow. For example, a recent review of more than 250 research articles on Indigenous languages and health found clear support for a positive link between the maintenance and revitalisation of Indigenous languages and positive health outcomes.
Failures of translation and interpretation during the covid pandemic have also highlighted the way that supporting a range of languages supports everyone’s health.
The research is on Smith Galer’s side; world events, unfortunately, are not.
Donald Trump has declared English the official language of the US, further marginalising other languages. New Zealand has just followed suit. Nigeria and the Philippines have recently abandoned their commitment to mother-tongue education in order to promote a single language in schools. China is intensifying its efforts to suppress minority languages and cultures.
These and other developments make Smith Galer’s book essential reading. How to Kill a Language combines masterful storytelling and insightful analysis to bring the tragic tale of global language loss to new audiences.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
