How to Kill a Language, Part I

Language loss and the book

0:00Into the wild, the Caltier Panther encounters a shimmering crocodile, a lonely lovebird, a breathless zebra, and a restless tiger.

0:18From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Bob Garfield, this week without Mike Volo, who's busy, dead serious here, deconstructing Jane Austen for an upcoming series. I still haven't even read Sense and Sensibility, but I have just finished an illuminating, gorgeously rendered, and controversial book titled How to Kill a Language, Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words.

0:49Author Sophia Smith-Gaylor traveled the world from big cities to remote villages, meticulously documenting the forces that have reduced history's many tens of thousands of languages to a small surviving fraction. These forces include migration, modern transport, imperialism, nationalism, globalization, ethnic repression, and voluntary assimilation, all rendering the majority of local and regional languages dormant or extinct.

1:23Sometimes an old woman dies, leaving behind not a single living speaker of a once vibrant tongue, one that was not only the means of communication, but also the storehouse of a society's knowledge and culture and precious artifacts utterly lost in translation. It is very moving and sometimes very sad. Much about Smith-Gaylor's narrative concerns her own grandmother, her own nana, born in a mountainous northern Italian village

1:54where the native language was called Emelian. Long since emigrated to London, she communicated with her granddaughter only via English or Italian, translated by Smith-Gaylor's trilingual mom. But what nuance, wisdom and emotion was lost in the process and what is lost when the last handful of nanas are gone? It is a poignant illustration of the stakes as languages die off and a sort of slow-burning mass extinction event

2:27that Gaylor calls linguicide and she's with me right now. Sophia, welcome to Lexicon Valley. Thank you so much for having me. What a brilliantly titled podcast as well. Thank you. That was Mike's invention and all he had to do was say the name and I was sold.

Statistics on vanishing languages

2:46To your book, the statistics you cite on language loss are thoroughly alarming. Where are we now worldwide and what's the projection? Linguists have estimated that by the end of this century, you know, bearing in mind we're already 25 years into it, 26 years, that about half of the world's languages that we have will no longer be with us in that they will not be spoken by a living speaker. They'll no longer be evolving as they have done inevitably for goodness knows how long.

3:19You know, in many of these languages cases, it's hundreds of years, if not likely thousands. And the half of languages that are going to disappear are minoritized. Overwhelmingly, they are languages that are not recognized by institutions or the nation states that they now find themselves in. And I think actually it's about 94% of the global population right now speaks something ridiculous like 6% of the world's languages.

3:52So, yes, there are many languages in the world today, but there's definitely a big old group of macro languages with loads and loads of speakers and many languages with very few.

What dies with a language

4:04When a language goes silent, what besides a vocabulary and a grammar is lost? This was really the project and mission of my book because I wanted to produce something that could be used qualitatively to describe the effect of what language loss is or does, what linguicide does. If you look at a language, if you look at a language, if you look at a language actually as this incredible human creation, that is ultimately a testimony to a people in a place in the past, present and future.

4:42That's really what I think a language is and represents. It's a toolkit. It's an encyclopedia of knowledge. It is your cultural inheritance. So, then ask, well, what does it mean to lose hold of knowledge or cultural inheritance? What does it mean to lose connection or identity? Not to mention community. Not to mention community. So, when I travelled to the places that I did, I really deliberately didn't want to write this book here from the desk that I'm speaking to you from in North London.

5:17I wanted to go to places as much as I was able to, to see this community firsthand and to see what did language loss mean or what did it signify even? One common thread that came out of the book, especially in places that have experienced colonialism, the loss of language was inextricably linked to the loss of not only all rights in general, but the loss of land rights. I saw that very pertinently in the chapter on the Karuk language in Northern California.

5:48So much, so much is lost, and many of the places I went to, there were commonalities between them, and then in some places there were sort of rather unique events.

Samoan healing knowledge

5:58On the subject of lost knowledge, you cite an example in remote Samoa where healers and keepers of the local language had certain folk knowledge with global life-saving potential that only became available to the rest of the world because one healer knew of its existence. Tell me about that. Yes, this is an example of a tribal healer speaking to an American, I believe, botanist who happened to be the son of missionaries and had grown up in Samoa and therefore spoke Samoan and was able to communicate with this healer.

6:41And I think that the bark of the mammolotry had been used to treat local illnesses, and as so often happens in this field that's called ethnobotany, you have scientists invariably informed by Western science travelling around the world to see if there's anything that they can learn from flora and fauna that they are not so familiar with. And this is one of those examples, many of these expeditions have led to the discovery of something that's been used for hundreds or thousands of years, something that you could heal a human with and has been tested by what is required of Western science.

7:22And so in this particular example, the botanist in question wanted to examine whether prostratin, I believe, is the name of the chemical, but wanted to examine whether, as it had been used to successfully treat people in Samoa, could it be used successfully to treat other conditions and diseases, including HIV, where he was. You know, we imagine pharma labs fiddling with their various chemicals to create compounds synthetically, but through all of history, most drugs have their origins in naturally existing compounds, like the tree bark you're talking about.

8:03But that knowledge would not have been transferred to scientists had there not been a Samoan language to Samoan language connection. Literally two weeks ago, I was at this incredible language vitalisation conference in Euskadi, or the Basque country. You have to say you're either in the southern or northern Basque country. You cannot say you're in northern Spain or southern France, because we're talking about the Basque country here, right? So I was in the southern Basque country at this incredible conference. There were language activists from all over the world that had been invited.

8:36And there was one gentleman who was from an indigenous group in Australia, who was talking about how Western science basically had only just recently verified for themselves the existence of a particular marsupial now long gone. And yet this marsupial has always been referenced in the language of his family and the language of his community that he comes from. And there are many, many instances like this around the world, discoveries, including discoveries that have only been made in the 2020s.

9:13And yet if indigenous groups had been consulted or whether their languages had been taken seriously enough and valued enough to better support and document and continue the life of, it wouldn't have taken Western scientists so long to find out about them.

Borders versus linguistic societies

9:30You're invoking the Basques to tell this story. It reminds me that the borders of nation states are not necessarily the borders of societies. Nations come into being for all sorts of reasons, sometimes imposed even from the outside. But the peoples living within and their languages can be, to say the least, lost in the shuffle. Languages don't care about borders. As I say in the last paragraph of the book,

10:00they defy borders in cases, including some that I cover in the book, they defy the borders of seas. They travel overseas. They are brilliantly agile and alive for this reason, in that we can take languages very, very far away from the habitat in which they may have been constructed and they may still find and foster community and connection, which of course is very important in my chapter about migration. To which we will return.

Overt forms of linguicide

10:31But to that point, linguicide, as you dub it, can but doesn't necessarily mean to kill with malice of forethought. It's not always first degree language murder. When a language loses its last speaker, we know, obviously, that there is a corpus delicti, a once vibrant tongue, but that doesn't mean there's murder. In the intro, I mentioned various other causes of death. What do you think are the most lethal? I took the term linguicide from how linguists defined it in the 80s.

11:07And for them, linguicide was both overt and covert. And so I took that taxonomy as well, because I largely agree with it. What the most obvious or overt forms of linguicide would be include the active criminalisation of a language. So let's take everything from someone being put into prison because they have spoken or taught a language, as has happened many times with the Kurdish language and its speakers above all in Turkey,

11:42but also in other places where Kurdish has spoken as well. I'm thinking about children being literally hit at school or punished at school for speaking in their mother tongue. And that has happened all over the world. It's especially happened within countries of the United Kingdom. It has happened a lot in North America. It has happened in France. It has happened across the colonial project, Asia, Africa. Yeah, in North America, both in the United States and in Canada, governments literally kidnapped indigenous children to be put into government schools to de-indigenize them

12:25and to teach them the values and religions and the language of the prevailing government, which was English. And with that, a very brazen attempt to diminish the power of whatever their tribal languages were. It's kind of amazing. This stuff went into the 20th century. Not only did it go into the 20th century, but people I interviewed, language activists working today in more than one country that I went to,

12:55their narratives and the missions, the personal missions that drive them commonly involve my grandfather faced this or my grandmother faced that. Lots of language activists cited my father wasn't allowed to speak this language. My mother wasn't allowed to speak it. And it's almost like they're trying to make up for lost time. Some of them have been given opportunities to learn the languages in a less stigmatized environment than their parents had. Many of them remember, and I'm thinking of when I went to Northern California, I spoke to people, not only who had parents who had been in these residential schools,

13:31but I spoke to people whose parents had escaped, they'd hidden so that they wouldn't be taken to the residential school. And obviously, I can imagine there were some people who succeeded in hiding and some who didn't. These stories are very much in living memory. We have it here in the UK as well. There are people who remember going through the experience of, for example, being hit at school with Scots, for sure. I've spoken to people who've had that experience. I wouldn't be surprised if I heard about Welsh speakers, Irish speakers experiencing the same thing. You're right to point out it's very close to living memory.

Covert erasure and shame

14:04Tell me about the covert undermining of native tongues. Linguicide doesn't always look or behave transparently or forthrightly as a public language ban or law. It can be more covert. I think about shame. I think about my experience going to Ecuador and speaking to community members who spoke Kichwa, which is the most spoken indigenous language in Ecuador, but is still vulnerable in terms of its endangerment status.

14:37You can look at that language story as one of great success. You can look at the successful re-awarding of language rights to indigenous people in the rights movement of the late 20th century. You can look at the creation of bilingual schooling across Ecuador as this huge language success story. On the other hand, you can look at how bilingual language education has not been given the funding or resources that it actually demands. There remain instances in Ecuador where parents do not want to send their children to the school because they think the children will perform less well at them.

15:12There are still a lot of pernicious myths that are spread around about Kichwa by Kichwa speakers. Kind of self-loathing you're talking about. Yes, and you're talking about a community trying to recover from linguicide after about 500 years of it under not only the Spanish Empire, but then the vestiges of what came after the Spanish Empire and a class structure in Ecuador where indigenous people were still very, very disenfranchised.

15:44I interviewed a language activist who worked at a school at the time and she was talking to me about parents who came to her really with this idea and messaging that they had internalised about how Kichwa was a language of the poor in the past and that if we are to succeed and move forward in the future, we must speak Spanish and we must speak English. It was an incredibly challenging experience for her to, in person, try and revalue and value Kichwa in the face of so much weight of history almost.

16:18If I can borrow from your very own Britain's campy old TV spy show, The Avengers, you aren't Steed, a professional spy. You are Mrs. Peel, a talented amateur, or put another way, an extremely diligent journalist, well-versed in linguistic theory, and willing to wear down shoe leather to locate these particulars you're giving me. Where all did you venture for this book and what dying languages did you principally investigate?

16:50Yeah, and I didn't have a travel budget. So this was me wangling every possible opportunity I could get to travel as far as I could. For that reason, there are a minority of chapters in the book where I didn't go in person because of additional security issues I would have run into had I tried to go there. But I did manage to get to Northern California, the Andes, and indeed the Amazon of Ecuador, Northern Ghana, Italy several times, Thessaloniki in Greece, Oman.

17:21I think that's it. Quite a bit of schlepping. Quite a lot of schlepping. It took about a year and a half to two years to do the travel.

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The tragedy of lost tongues

19:38Now, it's easy to say, oh well, c'est la vie. In nature, species go extinct all the time, and the global ecosystem manages to function. But you regard the death of a mother tongue to be a genuine tragedy. Why? I always think it's important to recognize that a lot of communities are no longer speaking a language that was very much a part of all the things we mentioned at the beginning of this podcast. Like, what makes up your identity, connection, community.

20:11Lots of people lost their link to that language through forces outside of their control. It feels like the right to a language was taken away. Collateral damage to large, mainly political or military events. Exactly. And lots of people, including myself, find ourselves in this position where a language has been lost. And in one way, you can simply feel resigned to that.

20:43But you're resigned to it because you were never given the power or opportunity to say yes. Or to say, no, I do want that. How do I keep hold of it? And I wanted to write a book that not only engaged with this discussion, but wanted to approach what I thought was commonly passive language. We may talk about endangered languages or languages being endangered, but I wanted to ask, well, who's endangering them? Languages do not get endangered by themselves.

21:13And actually, your point about animals becoming extinct, flora and fauna. The linguist David Crystal makes the point in his book, Language Death, that isn't it interesting that those issues, actually, the extinction of animals has got a lot more attention in the past, a lot more mainstream media coverage, even, than the case of language endangerment or languages under threat or the world's diminishing language diversity. You know, I kind of glibly use the term collateral damage, but there are too many examples of language suppression being actually an important part of the scheme and the hopes under political suppression.

21:59Notoriously, in Ukraine, where the ongoing resolve of czars and Soviets and now Putin's Russia attempts still to hide the language of millions in, you know, some locked attic. Why this imperative to shut down even very broadly spoken indigenous language and how did they go about doing it?

Suppression in Ukraine

22:25Yes, linguicide has been a sadly frequent event in Ukrainian history in that it was attempted by the Russian Empire, it was attempted by the USSR, it's now being attempted under Putin. The difference this time is that Ukraine had independence and sovereignty and a chance to really enforce many of its language rights before the current full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

22:55In the book, I mean, I was able to interview the state commissioner whose job, the state language commissioner, to protect the Ukrainian language. What was so incredible about that interview is that he saw himself as being the Ukrainian equivalent of the UK's British Council and French's... Académie Française. Yeah, Académie Française. And obviously, these are the sort of big government-sponsored language departments, as it were, that various governments have around the world.

23:27France's is all about basically prescriptivism. Ukraine's is all about literally defending a language against the annihilation that is intended for it by the Russian government. If anything, the Russian government's current attempt is incredibly unimaginative in how it borrows from so many previous rulebooks of linguicide. Like, it's so obvious what they're trying to do over history again and again. Just as one example, how do you devalue a language?

23:58Well, you call it a dialect. You try and diminish its status by saying it's not a proper language. Has that been done by Putin about Ukrainian? Yes, it has. Just as they tried doing it in the USSR and before that. And that's just plainly not true. But we've seen a lot of this mis and disinformation about language as part of this war. But we have also seen how a government may respond to language war. That trick of saying, well, it's just a dialect and it has to go.

24:29It just makes my brain shake because, OK, let's say Ukraine is a dialect of Russian. If 10 million people speak it or 40 million, what's the difference of what you call it? That's just a semantic trick. Like, how is that any kind of justification for trying to suppress it or annihilate it altogether? I've made video content online about language for a long time, for at least seven years now. I do lots of events. I will speak to members of the public who may be for the first time coming to someone and saying,

25:05what is the difference between a language and a dialect? Because I'm aware lots of people talk about it all the time and I don't know the difference. My provocation back is always to ask, does it matter? Why does it actually matter? On the one hand, if we simply talk about language varieties and someone being able to hold on to their language variety, it doesn't matter if it's a language or a dialect. Here in the UK, we have Scouse in Liverpool. We have lots of variants of English that may not qualify as languages in their own right. But my God, the people who live there would be heartbroken and feel great loss of connection and community if they were parted from said language variety.

25:43On the other hand, the difference between a language and a dialect perhaps does acquire lots of importance in a moment, as is happening in Ukraine, where calling the language a dialect is a means of attempting to diminish its status and annihilate it. In which case, amplifying that Ukrainian is a language in its own right is a way to defend it against that inevitable consequence that Putin is after. And what have the Romanovs and the Soviets and the Putin fascists done to try to disappear Ukrainian?

26:19What are their tactics? It has varied from everything, from the changing of toponymy, so altering the map of the land you are on, to names in Russian as opposed to Ukrainian. It has included removing Ukrainian language instruction and imposing Russian language instruction. And it has included, especially under Stalin, the killing of everyone from poets in the Ukrainian language to dictionary compilers.

Kurdish divisions and bans

26:51We earlier talked about Kurdistan, which exists in Turkey, Iraq and Syria principally. Kurdish culture and language have been squeezed like on two or three fronts for as long as I can remember. Let's start with why. Well, for but a fleeting moment, and I actually think the map may be held not so far from me, my own city in the British Library, but for a fleeting moment, Kurdistan was on a map as an independent state in its own right.

27:26But during the age of empire, where the Middle East was divvied up between the British and French primarily, Kurdistan was divided between the nation states that came out of that carving. And what that has transpired for the language of Kurdish today, which it's almost inaccurate to call it the language of Kurdish, because it's sort of Kurdish includes many Kurdishers. It includes two main varieties. One is written in an adapted Arabic script.

27:57One is written in an adapted Latin script. But they vary to the point that they can be mutually unintelligible. And... Like London and Yorkshire. Yeah, yeah. You've got countries like... Iraq currently has the best linguistic situation, and unsurprisingly, gifts Kurds, as I understand it, the most autonomy. Syria is sort of the next one down. And then you get to Iran and Turkey, and it's definitely in Turkey that speakers of Kurdish have experienced the most linguicide.

28:32This has included not only laws banning teaching Kurdish, to publishing in Kurdish, to speaking in Kurdish, but in Turkey, and indeed in Iran as well, many Kurdish people will have been blocked from even registering a Kurdish name when their child is born. They prescribe substitute names, these autographs do. Yes. For newborns. Yes. Many people go by two names. They'll have a government name, which is in an approved language, and then in the community, they'll all know each other by their true Kurdish name.

29:03In this household, I also have two names. One of them is on nobody's permissible list.

29:11I'll have to imagine what that is, Bob.

29:15This is among all these various varieties of language destruction. The stories are pretty sadly familiar. The native tongues of the Indonesian archipelago. You mentioned, we talked about Ukraine, but what about the 20th century Baltics, where in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, large percentages of the population are Russian speakers, forced Russian speakers from the occupation years of the Cold War. The Incan Empire, which yielded Kichwa in Ecuador, which now faces perhaps a final blow.

29:52We mentioned the indigenous languages of North America, also India, also Australia. So is suppression the greatest killer of languages?

Neglect versus suppression

30:03Is there something that's more lethal? No one's asked me that before. That's such a good question. Do you know what? And I hope you have listeners who like commenting or writing in, because I think everyone will have their own response to this. The reason why I'm hesitating is where you have such obvious suppression, it can sometimes be a little easier to identify and to reject or resist.

30:36I saw in the process of writing my book that the kind of withering institutional neglect of languages, and we can get onto that a little later with my nonna's language. But speaking broadly for a moment, it's when a language is so neglected or forgotten that no one bothers to ban it. No one bothers to actually name it or war against it in tabloidy op-eds or in political activism.

31:09I think I have witnessed firsthand that that's its own kind of damage. But obviously, that kind of damage does not lead to the death of speakers for their language. Whereas some of the suppression that I saw in the book, people are not only losing their languages, they are losing their lives. If I had to guess, I might nominate migration and upward mobility in an increasingly global world. People are sort of refugees from their own language and adopt the languages of wherever they wind up in order to walk up the economic ladder.

31:51Yes, so in the book, I try and prompt the question, why does that happen? Why is it that assimilation equals losing heritage language when we know since time immemorial that humans speak more than one language incredibly easily? Our brains love to learn languages and speak multiple languages. Why is it that in a world where we know multilingualism brings many cognitive benefits, aids in everything from communication skills to community and identity, and, you know, can literally get you more job opportunities?

32:29Why is it that assimilation equals, more often than not, monolingualism? In my case, and in the case of lots of my friends who are third generation, of third generation sort of migrant history, here in London, you know, multicultural, multilingual city, how is it that we've lost a link with our heritage language and find ourselves incapable of speaking it? That's not an accident. If we live in an environment that does nothing to consider the language we may arrive to a classroom in as an asset or a resource to maintain, then of course it's going to get lost.

33:09We don't think a lot of the time, as English speakers, how much instruction and education in English it took to get us speaking the way that we do, with the confidence that we do, across all the domains of life that we do. I, as an example, as a Brit, I was only allowed to give up English after I turned 16. All of that time, I was learning and developing how I thought and acted and spoke in it. I think a lot of people wrongly assume that, hey, if you're hearing a language at home, you're going to grow up and speak it.

33:44That sometimes happens. It actually only happens under quite a peculiar and particular set of circumstances. And more often than not, families will follow the three-generation model that the sociolinguist Joshua Fishman described, where by the third generation, you can go from being a family of many languages to a family of just one. I think that's generally the experience of American immigration, where the first generation Italians, for example, or Polish or Yiddish-speaking Jews or whatever, were so determined for their children to succeed, that they refused to let them speak the native language and insisted that only English be spoken even in the house.

34:32That must be a hard notion to defeat. Incredibly hard. And it is perpetuated or has been perpetuated, especially in the past, by the systems surrounding parents. I even remember in the book interviewing somebody who happened to be a linguist herself. And by that, she had knowledge through her career that had made her immune to linguistic misinformation. But she had a healthcare worker visit her as a new mother. And the healthcare worker said to her, after hearing her speak in Polish to her son, you shouldn't be doing that.

35:06It will confuse him. That goes against everything that they actually say about language acquisition for bilingual children. It's also quite an ethical error by the healthcare worker, like mind your own beeswax. But the healthcare worker wouldn't have said that to be mean or wrong. The healthcare worker thought she was passing on good advice. And there will be people who have heard similar messaging at a school, not only a healthcare setting, at schools, in parent groups, etc.

35:36Especially for parents, young parents, it's almost a hotspot for misinformation. If the correct information isn't present there first, which if we're not in a country constantly talking about the benefits of multilingualism, the right information simply won't be there. They'll encounter the misinformation first. And as we know with all myths and disinformation, if it gets to you first before the correct information, it's incredibly persuasive and challenging to alter afterwards. In deepest jungle, Cartier's panther spies a wandering bird that circles the skies.

36:13A lovebird, lost and missing his mate, is far from his path, in lonely state. Dry your tears, now there's a start. Follow my steps to heal your heart. Panther stalks through the leaves with silent grace. Through the power of scent, she finds the trace. Behold, two lovers reunite in the skies. A most precious thrill sparkling in their eyes. Together forever, they shine each day, bound by the beauty of Cartier.

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37:21You visited the province of Imabora in the Ecuadorian Andes to research Quechua, which again is a distant cousin of the language of the Incan Empire, Quechua. You described it a little while ago as a kind of asphyxiation, a shame about speaking a primitive language when what you most desire is modernity, whatever that's supposed to look like.

37:54Is that what we've been discussing about Yiddish and Italian and Polish in America? Certainly, a lot of immigrants, especially by the non-immigrants they were living in society with, were made to feel like their languages were not valuable and were not good to keep. Their accents were maligned and worthy of discrimination and mockery. I've interviewed so many people, I've had so many followers message me about this, talking about how they had a parent not pass down a language because they were terrified that their child would experience the same discrimination that they did.

38:30And to want a world of opportunity for that child meant getting them to speak the best English possible or whatever the dominant language was of the place that they were living in. It's a great tragedy that emanates from a society that does not value the language diversity within it. So, in language planning, you can look at the languages in the place that you live, governments do language planning, and you can see languages as rights that people have, you can look at them as resources to nurture and to maintain, or you can look at languages as problems to solve.

39:08And that was research that was done by a linguist in the last century. And the sort of conclusion is, well, in lots of places, including the US and including the UK, unfortunately, languages and language diversity have often been treated like problems to solve that you solve by getting everyone to speak English, with no thought as to what the loss of language diversity may signify.

Reviving dormant languages

39:34All right. Language planning. You, in your book, document many programs around the world to preserve and revitalize dying languages. What do you think is the most successful way to restore the number of speakers of a language that is going dormant? If we look at some of the most cited and excited about language revitalization stories in the literature, you always hear about Welsh, you always hear about Maori.

40:10Examples like that have only happened, this is not a comprehensive list, but the things that come to mind include the winning back of autonomy. Literally in the UK, literally in the UK, we had devolution, we had greater powers and autonomy given over to Wales, whilst Wales still remained within the UK. So it's almost this moment of acceptance of diversity, because it's what makes us unified. We are a country, by virtue of the many diverse communities that we have here, who yet still feel British.

40:43You see that with that does come funding, does come greater cultural awareness and conversation and political desire for language rights. In Aotearoa, New Zealand, something that was incredibly successful for them were the kohangareo, which are the language nests. So elders in the community who are fluent, raising and teaching children at preschool, creating very young, capable speakers who then kept having Maori instruction throughout their childhood and adolescence, so that they got the language back.

41:23That's kind of labour-intensive, expensive for whoever underwrites a programme like this. Yes, and at that same conference that I went to at the Basque Country, there was a Maori activist there, and she said, it takes one generation to lose a language and three to get it back. And I hadn't heard anyone put it like that before. Languages are simultaneously powerful and fragile. A language is so powerful that you have wars over language, that you have governments feeling like they need to create a law to ban a language.

42:00They mean that much. They can hold that much power. Yet at the same time, you can have a language in a family that misses one generation and as a result is gone from that family forever. Which sounds a bit like a paradox, just as unification by diversity does. Yeah. Earlier you mentioned French, where that is not the mentality. Some societies are fiercely protective of their native tongues, in particular France.

42:32You call them prescriptivists, I think most of them know them as word Nazis, of the Académie Française, are constantly trying to root out foreign, mostly English, loan words, which they believe corrupt the language. Which I think is pretty ironic, because French itself is a mélange of vulgar Latin, Gaulish, even Germanic tongues. But God help you, if you say email instead of un courriel, I mean, isn't that a futile effort of the French to fight for some sort of phony purity?

43:12In short, yes. Not that I'm biased in asking the question or anything, because I'd never let my bias sneak into an interview. But what the fuck is the matter with these people? My favourite example is streamer. They don't like French speakers saying streamer, or however a French speaker would pronounce that. Instead, they want them to call a streamer, as in a Twitch streamer, or someone who plays video games live. They want them to call them a jouet animateur en direct, which is just as snappy.

43:46Of course, because it rolls off the tongue. Yeah, it rolls off the tongue. But this is also one of the inevitable problems that comes out of language standardisation. So how do you prolong a language or teach someone else, say a child of yours, how to write the language down? There do have to be some sense of rules. You want them to not only write this language down, but you want the people who live at the other end of your country, hundreds and hundreds of miles away, to understand the letter when it arrives.

44:20Language standardisation makes those things happen. It aids communication and teaching. However, one of the negative consequences of language standardisation, and that is simply jargon for everyone deciding a language is spelt and put into grammar in a particular way. One of the negative effects is that, well, whose language or whose version of the language becomes standard? And this actually came up in the Kichwa chapter in Ecuador, because when Kichwa was set to text and a writing system was created of it,

44:54and they wanted to standardise it so that it could be more widely taught, so that you could begin examining people in it, what ended up happening is standard unified Kichwa is not so unified. You know, it really actually far better represents the variety spoken in the Andes of Ecuador than it is of the Amazonian Kichwa that's spoken. So you end up with lots of speakers very, very unhappy that their language is not included, actually, in this standard,

45:25whether it's spellings or literal entire words, and it's a huge problem in examinations. So you can have people who are definitely fluent speakers, but because they don't use the particular word or phrasing that unified Kichwa speakers may select, they would flunk an exam. And that's, to me as an outsider, feels desperately unfair. And to fail some of these exams means you can't get particular jobs. So it does have massive economic consequences. I think we're getting to maybe the nub of this whole conversation.

45:59Language is not just a lexicon. It's also a kind of social contract. And, you know, you don't necessarily get to sign the contract.

46:12Yeah. Also, on the one hand, I feel like I have various linguistic identity crises. I, in one moment, can be on an interview like this talking about how varieties of languages that we speak, and even if we don't speak in the standard way, that is often something to celebrate. It's something that is a dialectal variation to you, is a vocal fingerprint of where you come from. That's a glorious thing to have and possess. But then I will finish this interview.

46:42I may write a few pages, and I'll be writing in a way that I deem good writing. And what does good writing mean? Well, it inevitably means it adheres to some standard that someone else set that is not representative of the dialectal variants I've just praised. Lots of us have to contain many multitudes when it comes to all of this. Well, you're adhering very well, I must say. Oh, thank you. It's truly a delight to read. You know, I spend quite a bit of time in, obviously, Serbia, which is part of ex-Yugoslavia,

47:15and some of the other former republics of Yugoslavia are Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro. Now, lo and behold, each of those independent republics have their own language, which they claim to be entirely distinct from the Serbo-Croatian that was the lingua franca of Yugoslavia. The thing is, those independent languages are 99-point-something identical. So, in some cases, it's not just a social contract, but it's like a nationalist coat of arms.

47:52The languages you're talking about is so interesting what's happened to them, because, yes, in one historical moment, they were split apart and given these national separations. This is Bosnian compared to this is Serbian, etc. But you then had, some years later, it wasn't that long ago, it was definitely in the 2020s, you had linguists see or perceive that these languages were being used once more as weapons of nationalism, and the linguists all came out and said, it wasn't only linguists, it was speakers of the languages,

48:26it was political activists, etc., felt the need to announce publicly, I think they all might have signed a letter, and they said, we are one language, we are varieties of one language, as if to say, do not use this linguistic difference we have assigned ourselves as a means to draw barriers and conflict between us. It is fascinating how that may happen with languages that are, in fact, very close to each other, or which have been named different languages, when perhaps linguists would not define them as such.

48:59Let me change your subject a bit to talk about really successful rescues of dying languages. You know, you've talked about a couple of methods and examples, but you wrote about modern Hebrew, which was not just a reclamation, it was practically a resurrection. There were no Hebrew speakers for centuries, and then comes Israel, and it became the national language. How in the world did they do that?

49:31I thought it was crazy researching for this book and discovering that the language of the modern Jewish nation-state was almost German. Hebrew was that sort of inconceivable as a national language at the time of what was proto-Zionism and would become Zionism, that other languages were held under consideration. And Hebrew was everywhere when I first started researching endangered languages, languages under threat, and language revitalisation,

50:03because it is often put forward as a miracle story. It's the language that died and came back to life, as you described, resurrected. And even in that, that's biblical language. That is the language of mystery and divine power. And so that chapter, when I looked into the story of modern Hebrew, was the one where I looked into sacralisation, and quite a unique form of language loss or death, in which a language can be trapped in amber,

50:36not for being relegated to the past, deemed of such little value that we don't use it anymore in society. No, no, no. It is actually of so great a value that we do not want it almost being sullied in vernacular speech. In the book, I look at how that was a kind of happenstance that came out of the historical events of who would have once been living Hebrew speakers a long, long, long, long, long, long time ago. What happened was Hebrew did actually stay alive.

51:07It just stayed alive, not as a vernacular, day-to-day means of conversation, but it stayed alive as a liturgical language. The power, the status that it had, meant it was used in Jewish scholarship, sciences, poetry. In the European Enlightenment age, you start seeing it being used across the press. You see it acquiring all these uses, and incredibly, it still doesn't acquire vernacular spoken use.

51:39And it's not until this moment where Elisa Ben-Yehuda, who is one of the early Zionists, says he's going to make, basically he's going to make Hebrew the language of the Jews, make it a spoken language, and it's going to be the language of the nation we want. That's how Hebrew came about. However, Ghilad Zuckerman, there is a linguist who has posed the question that, should we be calling it Hebrew? It is actually so changed from biblical Hebrew, not only because of this paper life it has led, as opposed to spoken one,

52:10but because the revivalists, who had to take a largely biblical language and render it a spoken language, they were not only so influenced by the languages that they came from themselves and had to coin so many words. There was so much interference from the native languages they arrived with. Ghilad Zuckerman suggested, this is almost a Neo-Hebrew. He suggests it could be called Israeli. It is actually very, very different from biblical Hebrew.

52:42We shouldn't look at it as the same language, is what he says. And if you don't look at it as the same language, then that myth or that foundational story about the language as being resurrected can no longer be true. It was a very interesting provocation. Well, even if it's entirely constructed, I mean, even if the Hebrew letters weren't, you know, approximately like biblical Hebrew, it took hold compared to, for example, Esperanto, which went nowhere. And also, these languages don't have to be the same

53:12as they were millennia ago to be precious or important. That can be a controversial thing to say if what is important to you is the unstopped continuation of a language and its structure. Actually, an awful lot of the languages that will be revived or are being revived right now, some of them are languages that were thankfully documented in the 19th or 20th centuries, and they are being revived long after the last native speaker died.

53:42You know, inevitably, those languages have so much reconstruction happen to them that it's very likely they are not a direct copy or perfect mimicry of what once was. Yet, that does not mean that this is not part of that language's story coming back. And even languages that do not disappear evolve. I want to come back to your nana's Emelian, what you describe as less Italian than angry French,

54:16peculiar to that mountain village where the Italian peninsula begins to jut into the Mediterranean. When your nana died, Emelian itself also inched toward oblivion, which for you, I guess, is a double heartache. In fact, it seems to be what spawned this whole exploration. But what should it mean to us?

54:39It's never about why should you care about this language? What should you do to keep this language going? And I say that not only speaking of my nana's Emelian, but talking about all language diversity. It's not why should I care? It's more, who am I to say that this language no longer merits a place here? Who am I to actually even have an opinion on it? The only people is the speaker community themselves.

55:10And overwhelmingly, including in Italy, there are main people who speak these languages day to day. I was hearing the language day to day until, you know, not that long ago. It ended when my nana died. I began writing the book, still listening to it. Around the world, there are people desperate about keeping hold of the languages that are now, in terms of speaker number, threadbare. In their case, they do need resources. They need funding. Languages do not remain in a community by pixie dust.

55:44They need proper institutional weight and recognition. So it's less about what you need to do as sort of a rogue listener. It's more about what is happening where you live that could be making this worse for speakers of such languages. I would have a very different answer if I was speaking to the prime minister. I would have a very different answer if I was speaking to people with power. Often the case for individuals who do not have a heritage language or minoritized language in their life. One of the biggest things that you can do

56:16is just have curiosity and respect for them as you encounter them. That you don't make fun of people's accents when they speak English a little differently to you. That you do not put languages, especially languages you don't speak or understand, in hierarchies where English is at the top and they're at the bottom. Well, I just want to say that the way politics are going in the UK, next time you talk to me, I might be prime minister. Yeah, it's true, it's true. I might be prime minister. I'm curious, is there one word

56:48or one phrase of your nonna's that is kind of your Proustian madeleine? Well, for me, it's Pechog. Nonna used to call me my little Pechog. And it's funny because the way that my nonna spoke in my head is simply the way that my nonna spoke. But apparently for Italians, the accent is very strong of where we come from, which is in Piacenza in the north of Italy, in the mountains, it's really hard actually to translate that phrase. But it's a term of endearment that you would give a child, which is why I remember it so fondly

57:20because it's what nonna called me as a little kid. I translated it as best as I could. It's like a little mess of mischief. It kind of means a little mess. You'd call someone a Pechog if they're being a little bit cheeky or naughty. So obviously I was often a little bit cheeky or naughty, but she said that a lot. And then I have a really strong memory of us in hospital and mum and nonna would exclusively speak to each other in Emilia, as they called it, Dialut. They would speak to each other exclusively in Dialut.

57:52And of course that meant that no one else could understand. It was like the secret language that especially in the public setting of hospital ward, no one would understand them, including Italian speakers. And I remember a tea arriving for nonna and nonna taking a little sip and saying, le mi a dos. That means that the tea wasn't sweet enough. And in standard Italian, that would be non è dolce, but for her, le mi a dos. It's really quite different. And handy.

58:23Yeah, very, very useful. And actually mum and I were at a book festival this weekend with my dad as well. And when mum wants to say things that she doesn't want other people to understand, she says them to me in Italian. There's never an expectation I'm supposed to reply to this. What's cool is I now can reply in Italian to her. And I did. But she was speaking to me in Italian. And we were at this pretty posh book festival. I said to her, like, don't speak Italian because the chances are there will be people here. You think it's a secret language here. They're going to possibly understand what you're saying. You need to speak in Dialut.

58:53And it made her speak in Dialut, which was wonderful. Sophia, thank you so much. I really look forward to picking up this conversation in part two. Thank you. Sophia Smith-Gaylor is author of How to Kill a Language, Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words. Lexicon Valley is edited by Mike Volo and produced by Livia Bloom Ingram, who brought this book to our attention and so grateful are we that she did. Tune in again next week for part two of my conversation

59:25with Sophia Smith-Gaylor. We're an iPlay Devil's Advocate. Strictly pro bono, of course. I'm Bob Garfield. Bye-bye.

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