How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words by Sophia Smith Galer told the story of ten of the world’s endangered languages and the forces that are at work to eradicate them. Not all of these languages are under threat for the same reasons, and Galer documents each language’s decline by a different cause, using blunt chapter headings, such as Emigrate; Build; Occupy; Expel; Exploit, Criminalize; Shame; Sanctify; Ignore; and Remember. You get the idea: nefarious forces are at work eliminating the world’s languages.
As a student of endangered languages such as Romansch and Breton, I lapped up this book and couldn’t put it down. Neither of those two languages was profiled in the book, although Galer took frequent swipes at France’s official policy of promoting monolingualism at the expense of its own minority languages such as Breton and Basque. She was international in her scope, profiling threatened indigenous languages in Oman, California, Ecuador, Kurdistan, Ghana, and included national languages such as Ukrainian and Hebrew. The former has been under threat for over a century, in danger of being supplanted by Russian. The Occupy chapter dealt with Ukrainian. However of all the languages covered in this book, the one under the Sanctify chapter, Hebrew, is in a class of its own. After it lost its status as a living spoken language centuries ago, it was revived from being strictly a language of religion that was read and rarely spoken into the national living language of Israel and of Jews the world over.
Galer wove stories about her beloved late grandmother throughout the text. Her nonna grew up in the region of Emilia-Romagna, Italy speaking its dialët, and passed it down to her daughter. Galer, however, has only partial fluency in her ancestral native tongue, in that she understands the language but cannot speak it. This is one reason that languages die, when people emigrate and do not pass their native language to future generations. The chapter Remember honours her own dialët, which Galer states upfront will probably be extinct by the end of this century.
In terms of national minority languages, Galer makes it clear:
“A language’s health is unequivocally tied to the tolerance and encouragement of multiculturalism, and these are values that, as the far right surges globally, are increasingly under threat.”
As long as those who speak minority languages feel maligned and less privileged, they will abandon their mother tongues. The Ecuadorian language Kichwa (a national variety of Quechua) is the subject of the chapter on Shame. Ecuador has tried to generate a greater literacy among its Kichwa speakers by creating a unifying orthography that encompasses all idioms, but this endeavour to save the language distances those who already speak it. Galer provided examples of native speakers puzzling over words that they have never seen written before, and in an idiom of the language they do not speak. The creation of a literary language using pieces of various spoken idioms or even newly invented words is by no means new. As a student of the Romansch idiom Sursilvan, I am aware of the opinions of Swiss who dislike the literary hybrid known as Rumantsch Grischun (for the most part, it’s not positive).
None of the languages in these chapters has been killed off yet. Galer does write about some recent losses, such as Ubykh, and some indigenous American languages that are down to their last few or single speakers. We lose an entire world of knowledge when a language dies. In this interconnected world where people are increasingly moving to the cities, the languages of rural areas are rapidly disappearing, and the rate of decline is outpacing efforts to save them.
What’s with the Kubota-stylized front-cover font? In keeping with the theme of the dramatic word Kill in the title, the pieces taken out of the letters resemble what might happen if you splattered machine-gun fire over the cover.