120: How (not) to kill a language - Interview with Sophia Smith Galer

Welcome and behind the zines

0:00Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch, and today we're getting enthusiastic about many ways people are fighting to reclaim their languages around the world, with Sophia Smith-Gaylor, who's a journalist and content

0:33creator whose work focuses on language, technology, and culture. She's the author of How to Kill a Language, and she's based in London, UK. But first, our most recent bonus episode takes you behind the zines. We've been having fun making several different linguistics-themed zines, and now we chat with our very own technical editor, Leah Velleman, about the work she's been doing with me behind the scenes to bring those Lingthusiasm zines to life. Go to patreon.com slash Lingthusiasm to listen to this and over 100 bonus episodes, and also to see and give comments on the next

Language background and journalism

1:04zines before anyone else. Hi, Sophia. Welcome to Lingthusiasm. Hello. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for being here. Before we get into your work and your book, we're going to start with the question we ask all of our guests, which is, how did you get interested in linguistics? I loved languages before I ever loved journalism. It was the first thing that I studied. So I did

1:43Spanish and Arabic as my undergraduate degree, and before that had spent my childhood and adolescence being fascinated by the languages that were available to me. So in my school, that was Spanish, French, French, and Latin. And then at home, I grew up listening to my mum and my nonna speak to each other in sort of a glittering array of languages. In the book we're about to discuss, I quite naively thought that that that was English and Italian, and there in fact was another language hiding in there, lying in wait for me.

2:17But yeah, so I really had quite a rich linguistic soundscape growing up, and then through all of my student experiences. And I went on to become an international news reporter. So my languages came in pretty handy, but maybe not as often as you'd think they would be in demand. But perhaps that's because I worked in a British newsroom where, you know, everyone's very focused on English. And yeah. Yeah. And so there's a lot of, you know, reporting on things happening in other countries, but

2:48interviewing people who speak English in those countries or things like that? Yeah, exactly. I can remember both. I had two newsroom jobs. One was at the BBC, and the other was at Vice News. And I can remember scenarios in both reporter roles where I found a story because I was the first English speaking journalist to identify it because I had been able to access it in sort of the target language, as it were. That's really helpful. Yeah.

3:18Yeah, really helpful. And I can remember instances where I was perhaps able to build rapport quite quickly with someone because I could tell we had a language in common. It came in useful in sort of sneaky, surprising instances. But it's not like day to day, I had editors saying, hey, Sophia, we could use some of your language skills right now, please. That didn't happen as often as I had hoped it would. And I was always really interested in language. But it became,

3:49yeah, this sort of tool in my wider skill set that was sometimes used, sometimes underused, I desperately tried to keep them going. And it was in 2019, when I became the first BBC journalist to use TikTok. I was a video journalist at the time. It was quite like different for journalists to be using it at that point. I was one of the only ones in the UK, nevermind the only one at the BBC. The only

4:19person really doing it properly was Dave Jorgensen at the Washington Post famously in the US. Oh, I remember that guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I did it for a bit. I basically kept going viral. I kept getting into trouble for not doing anything naughty at the BBC, because the BBC is just like that. I kept being told, kind of just to be careful with my TikToks, even though they were never breaking any guidelines. And then eventually, I got told, please stop putting BBC journalism on there. And I thought, okay, well, I can't put BBC

4:52journalism on there. But that doesn't mean I can't TikTok full stop. So I started making language explainers. Because I loved languages. They were my biggest sort of hobby and passion. And I thought, well, okay, if I can't talk about my work, what else do I know about? So I started making video explainers about language. And that's how I properly got into the sort of linguistics space.

Writing how to kill a language

5:16So you wrote a book called How to Kill Language, which I very much enjoyed reading. Let's do the little elevator pitch. What is How to Kill a Language about in a nutshell? It's about language loss and erasure. It's about a phenomenon called linguicide, which might be a word listeners may not have heard before. And if I achieve anything with this book, it's to popularize it as a term. Linguicide referring to the death of a language. Yeah, the suppression or erasure of a language. And it's my journey traveling around the world,

5:51gaining an understanding of why languages seem to be disappearing and unprecedented. Right. How did you decide that you needed to write a book? How did you decide this particular book was a book you needed to write? Yeah, it's interesting, because, as you can tell, from reading it, obviously, it was about a subject incredibly important to me and very close to me, given it involves my family. It was an uncomplicated decision, actually, thinking, this, this is my next book, this should be my next book. I just, I basically just backed myself. And I just hoped that I think no one's written a book like this before.

6:27Or I'm, I'm confident my publisher will want it. Fingers crossed. I'm going to do it. And if it doesn't become a book, it will become something else. But I've got to do this. I've got to do this, not only for myself on a personal level, but a book like this doesn't exist, and it needs to. One of the things that I thought was very powerful about the book was that it wasn't just, okay, here's a bunch of languages dying, and now we're all just very sad about it. It was a lot about the individual people who are sort of on the ground, trying to push back against this and say, here's what I can do instead. Here's, I can learn this language of my ancestors. These are all the

7:01different sort of ways that I'm going about doing that, or trying to teach it to children in the community, or create more environments in which people can use the language, or document and preserve the literature or the stories of the language. It's people sort of trying to push back against this tide. What made you decide to frame it around the sort of killing a language compared to like how to keep a language alive? I know from my experience as a news journalist, we have an expression, if it bleeds, it leads. Right. I know that the media wouldn't have picked up on it if this was a book.

7:33Right. That's one thing. That's not the actual reason, but that's something that definitely influenced why I defended this title. The media just wouldn't have picked up on it, especially in the UK, a very monolingual media that is totally clueless, probably, about it as a phenomenon. More fundamentally, when you investigate language endangerment and languages being put under threat, so a core thing about this book is it isn't only about endangered languages, as in they have endangerment status.

8:04It's about languages, in theory, of millions of speakers. You know, Italian is in there, Ukrainian is in there, but looking at contexts in which speakers feel like they've been robbed of a language that they didn't want to be robbed of. And when you look at it as a space, there's always so much focus on languages being endangered in a passive way, rather than pivoting the focus on who's endangering them, what's endangering them. Languages don't get endangered or get put under threat by themselves.

8:35Something, someone does something. So I really wanted to like pivot the focus, because as a journalist, that's the role I felt like I had. It was where can I locate who holds accountability or responsibility? Where can I apply scrutiny? That's the lens that I took with this. And very quickly in the research process, I learned for the first time the word linguicide. And I thought, that's it. That's what we're talking about here. It makes complete sense. And that was the guiding

9:12force in the book, looking at this, looking at every language that I took hold of, under the lens of linguicide had suffered and why and who had done it. Who are some of the actors that you were talking about who've done that? Yes. So if you take the examples of, as Tova Skatnam Kangas kind of categorised linguicide, she talked about overt and covert linguicide, which is very compelling. And I think linguists since sort of agree or disagree with that structuring, but the most overt linguicide would be

9:47Russia and Turkey. Russia and Turkey in their histories have literally banned languages being used in public life, enacted, you know, bizarre edicts, banning letters and alphabets, stuff like that, all in an attempt to diminish the prestige or presence of a particular language. So in the Ukrainian chapter, I look at Russia's role there, which is threefold, because it began in the Russian Empire, it was repeated in the USSR. Now Putin is doing it again in the current invasion of Ukraine.

10:21And then in the Kurdish chapter, that's where I looked at Turkey, Kurdish being uniquely attacked as a language that now finds itself spoken primarily between four different modern nation states, having themselves been denied statehood, sort of during the great imperial land grab of the 19th century. More covert forms of linguicide look a little different. So in the Kichwa chapter, I look at shame, and I look at how shame can begin with overt linguicide, as was seen in Ecuador under the Spanish Empire.

10:59But as late as the 90s, despite the indigenous movement in Ecuador, you had teachers telling parents, we shouldn't be teaching our kids Kichwa, it's got bad grammar, all of these ideas. Or even just the sort of, they'll never get a job, but like, this is the language of advancement or modernism or, you know, economic success. Exactly, exactly. So there are so many different levels. And therefore, I knew that I had to structure the book in a way where I could visit each of these different levels, or, you know,

11:31weapons of murder, if we if we take the linguicide metaphor further. I wanted a book that could look at these different, these different methods. One of the things that I was impressed by in the book was that you travel to a bunch of different

Travels and media work

11:43areas and talked with people. How did those trips come to be? How did you decide where to go and who to talk to? So a couple were kind of already decided for me, I would say, because obviously, my personal story is a part of this book, and it kind of flanks the book. It's the it's the first chapter in the last. So those languages were decided. So you had to go to Italy because your family is Italian? Yes, the languages I didn't physically go to the region where it's from, as it were, is because it's for security concerns. So that was the otherwise I'd have been there,

12:17I would have been there. Right. So that covers, that's why I didn't personally go to Ukraine, Kurdistan, or Israel. Right. I have, I've been, I have been to Israel in the past. And I still went and visited and interviewed speakers of languages. I either did it over Zoom, or I did it in the UK. So I went to the really, really, really cool Kurdish language archive that the University of Exeter has, for example, because I was able to, I was able to do that here happily. And there's a lot of diaspora populations in various places.

12:50Yes. So just because I couldn't go to somewhere physically doesn't mean I didn't speak to people exactly. And other than that, I somehow managed to wear my way into trips to California, Ecuador, Ghana, Oman, Greece. Have I left it? I've possibly left somewhere out. But even just in that list, in the space of sort of not much longer than a year, I had been to all of those places. And it was very tiring, but very, really important for the book. The book was always intended to feel

13:28part polemic, part travelogue on a disappearing world. And that's what I wanted the reader to feel like. And I've written a book, I've done this sort of freelance internet content creator type of thing. I'm not assuming you had someone bankrolling you the entire time you were doing those trips. No, so I didn't get a travel budget. So the advance certainly was entirely used on making these trips happen and, and right, but it wouldn't be enough to pay my rent with or bills with.

14:00So throughout this entire time, I was never really able to stop doing like my normal work. And I don't work for a newsroom anymore. So that the work that primarily I do these days is like my life sort of 50-50. I'm either doing stuff for Sophia Smith-Gaylor, my awful boss that I have, who makes me make videos. She makes me make videos all the time. I do, you know, I happily, I do a lot of like public speaking. Sometimes I get to do brand partnership. I kind of have lots of creative

14:32revenue streams in the creator journalist sphere. And then I set up a company last year and I deliver social media consulting. I have an app, you know, so like newsrooms bring me in, research organizations bring me in and I help them figure out how, how they can use vertical video. So the idea is that I, I learned the hard way. I had to spend seven years pumping out video content all by myself. You don't have to do that. Just seeing what does well.

15:02Just pay me and listen to my advice. So that's, that's also what I do. And I'm, I'm turning that into a production company now. Okay. So as well as, as well as the consulting and everything, I'm, I made my first show earlier this year, which was a podcast where I interview creatives about the languages that they've learned and how the languages that have shaped them is how I say it. At the beginning of every podcast, I say, what are the languages that made you? So yes, so I'm increasingly going to using it to try

15:36and make more language shows. So it's not just me making one-off videos all the time, but it's a wider kind of Sophia language nerd universe that I can invite people into. If you could have been given like one extra chapter, if there was one thing you've been able to add to the book after it's been published, I know it's been out for a while in the UK and more recently in North America, what would that thing be? Or, you know, entire sequel? I actually don't think, I think I made the right decision. I mean, in theory, did I go through the entire comprehensive list of Linguicide? Maybe I didn't.

16:10What do you mean by the list? Well, I mean, in theory, we do know that there are languages that are no longer with us because all the speakers died of disease. So we know from sort of the colonial expansion into the Americas that there are entire peoples who have been wiped out, not only from violence, but from dying from diseases that the Europeans brought with them and that they carried no immunity for. Right. However, is that really a chapter about disease or is that a chapter about colonialism?

16:43So, you know, so that's ultimately, that's why I didn't do a whole chapter on that. And I didn't really explore it too deeply as a research area. However, we do know from COVID-19 that lots of elders were lost from indigenous communities who were very valuable in their communities for their linguistic knowledge. So I think there could have been something deeper there that could be interesting for me to revisit another time. I'd very happily go to like different parts of the world. Incredibly already my speaking commitments about the book, I am being invited more than I've

17:17ever been invited to speak in Wales and Scotland, which I'm very happy about because obviously... Oh, that makes sense. For speakers there, this is not an intellectual curiosity. This is a living political issue, how their languages are being handled. We have very divisive right-wing, far-right rhetoric, especially here in the UK, that's really been quite demonising of languages in general, especially migrant languages, but even including our indigenous languages.

17:48That was one of the things that I thought was a strength of the book, that it wasn't this sort of abstract or decontextualised look at languages dying. You're also examining that at a very personal level in terms of your own story and your own family's story. Do you want to talk a bit more

Family language and Italian roots

18:01about that? Yeah. So the reason I was alerted to language endangerment in the first place is because of this curiosity I had about the language that mum and nonna spoke. I always felt ashamed for not speaking Italian. I always felt like it was my fault growing up. My nonna moved here when she was in her early twenties and spoke really good English. She struggled, she would have struggled to read English. I had to read her post to her, you know, if I was visiting her, but she could speak it really

18:34well. Had certainly completely frigging integrated into her street, you know, not like how people like to talk about migrants. This was someone very, very, very integrated and lovely. And who also had valiantly maintained her heritage languages? She spoke English and Italian, or so I thought, to my mum. Right. And before I was born, my nonna, who my nonna married, came from the same part of Italy as her. He came to the UK when he was seven. So he would have had sort of more of a London Cockney accent,

19:10whereas my nonna had a very, very Italian accent. Right. And every morning mum would ring nonna on the phone. So I heard mum and nonna every day when I lived at home. And then every time I went to nonna's, I always understood like what they were saying. I just couldn't produce the language myself. And fast forward to my twenties, you know, I've managed to get really proficient in Spanish and Arabic. And it's kind of like, how did I not get proficient

19:43in Italian? It was the language that had got away. That's how I felt about it. The language that got away. And so in my, in the privacy of my own adult life, where I didn't have to do an exam in something anymore, you know, I didn't have to do a fusty old textbook or anything. I just started trying to listen to more music to better acquaint myself with Italian in a way that I hadn't really ever done. And lots of surprises and discoveries emerged. My Italian was way better than I'd ever given

20:18myself credit for. I actually went and did an Italian class directed at Italo di Scendenti in Milan. And that's a scene that could have been in the book that didn't make it eventually. It was deemed too tangential. Oh, tell me about that class. I want to know. Yeah. So Italy has this sort of routes tourism program. It's very loose. It's not the most organized thing in the world, which is not surprising for the Italian government, but it's

20:48admirable. They want to engage the 60 plus million descendants in the Italian diaspora abroad to bring them to Italy because Italy would make a lot of money from that if it was sort of better coordinated. Yeah. And I mean, I know there's tons of Italian descendants in Canada as well. Exactly. I have relatives in Canada. So yes. Yeah. And well, if you ever come visit them. Yeah. Yeah. Let me know. And I found out about it and I went and did two weeks of it and I did a language test to get in and

21:22they gave me B2. I was put in the B2 class and B2 is pretty high. It's pretty good. Yeah. And I'm sure I'm not the most grammatically correct B2, but it's because I can understand everything. Two Italians can be here having a conversation and I know everything that's going on. Anyway, so in discovering that my Italian was actually not as bad as I thought it was, I realized, hmm, mum and Nonna are not speaking Italian to each other. Yeah.

21:53So you've been spending all this time trying to learn Italian, quote unquote, standard Italian, and that wasn't actually what they were speaking. Wasn't it? No. Okay. So to just give some examples, Nonna always referred to me as la fiola when she was talking about me to my mum. And that's girl or daughter in Italian. Standard Italian, it'd be la figlia. So we've gone from la figlia to la fiola. La fiola. You can see the relationship, but those are not the same words. They're not the same word. Today in Italian is oggi. Today in Emilia is inca.

22:30Inca. Yeah. That sounds very different. Yeah. And in the book, I interview this incredible Italian linguist who had his own weird moment that relates to mine. He was in a language class at university doing linguistics and they were talking about fronted vowel sounds. And he was saying, oh yeah, we do that where I come from. And the teacher said to him, no, you don't. That sound doesn't exist in Italian. No, that sounds not in Italian. And he was like, what? But it's what I use all the time.

23:04But it's in my Italian. Yeah. And he comes from a part of Italy that's very close to where Nonna was from. So it carries far more vowel diversity than standard Italian does. It's effectively one of the many evolutions of vulgar Latin that is a little more influenced by Gaelic influences, Lombards, etc. And so it sounds, for me, it's a, I associate it as a francophone sound, but obviously it's not

23:35francophone. It's just, it's from what today are the borderlands between Italy and France. So, apron, grembule in Italian, scusselin. Oh, that sounds very French. That nasalized vowel. Wow. Yeah, very nasal. And there's also, there's a sound that mum makes that a lot of the men make down at the club, which we'll speak about later. And when I went to Italy to do these research trips, a lot, I noticed, especially men do this sound at each other.

24:09What's the sound? Yeah. If you're shocked by something or you're having a bit of a joke with your mate, you may go, uh, and it's a sound like my mum and my uncle do it all the time. And it's, I'm pretty sure, I'm very confident. It's, it's sort of the, oh, with a line going down it that I associate with Scandinavia. Yeah. I mean, it's in French, I think as well, that, uh, sound, but like this sort of front rounded vowel. And even in German, I think it like, sort of like, like, I guess, um, loud is

24:44more like, uh, than, uh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's like, uh, and even on Wikipedia, it says, this is a sound in Scandinavia. And I'm like, well, it's also in the Apennines of Northern Italy, actually. And it's very, very particular to the Piazanté variety. So Piazanté is like the adjective that means from Piacenza, Piazainza. And it's only in that particular variety, really, and some Lombard varieties that you hear it. So

25:15it's not even present in other varieties of Emilien, which is this unstandardized language. Like in many ways, like the natural state of languages is to exist in this unstandardized, like a whole bunch of different micro dialects way. And like our modern conception of Italian was created in like the 1800s with Italian unification. And before that, it was just a whole bunch of dialects. But the same thing is true throughout France, throughout Germany, throughout, you know, the Iberian Peninsula with Spanish and Portuguese and Catalan and stuff

25:48like that. But like the nation state where you take the capital or you take the prestigious location and say like, that's the version of the language we're going to consider correct. And now suddenly everyone else has been defined as speaking their version of it wrong compared to, you know, like they were all just doing it fine until their version was like legislated as being wrong or legislated out of existence. Exactly. And because of what you've just described, in the 20th century, and it would have been, you know, really present in the early 20th century and then gradually diminishing,

26:22Italy was a country of diglossia. It was a country where you probably, if you had any kind of education, you'd have spoken standard Italian and known how to read and write in it. But at home, in many parts of Italy, you'd have spoken the local language, the regional language. And that's fast diminishing, that diglossia is fast diminishing. And, you know, in my family, my mum will be the last who you can do that. And in Italy, in Northern Italy, especially if you speak two languages, it's because you speak Italian and English. It's not because you speak Italian and a

26:58local language. Yeah. And the vast majority of these local languages, predominantly the indigenous ones, they are not protected by the minority language legislation that Italy has. Well, because they're probably not even considered, like, proper languages or languages at all to be targeted by the legislation? They're called dialetti, and it felt wrong in the book. So in the book, the chapter that's about the language that mum and nonna spoke with each other, they only ever called it dialet. And it didn't feel right to me to call it anything but that.

27:30Like, it's been given this official name, but that's not what they call it. Yeah, to go to them and say, I've had all these conversations now with my mum about her own language that she speaks that I don't. And I tell her things about it. And I do it because I'm interested to see if she agrees with it. I'm interested to see if she thinks it's interesting or not. So for example, this anecdote is in the book where I told her that it's closer to French than Italian. If you do almost like a linguistic DNA analysis of it, it's closer to French than Italian. And mum just goes, well, I could have told you that. Yeah, she was totally, she was

28:03totally unbothered by the fact that linguists had confirmed it. Like, I could have told you that. So you run monthly language bars at London's Casa Italiana.

Running London language bars

28:13Yes, I do. Can you tell us more about these? So I guess it's kind of my own contribution to language activism. I came up with the idea as I was going through this process I've described to you of figuring out my family's linguistic portfolio. And I know from my experiences, language learning in different contexts, that it's not only really important to find like minded people, it's important to find safe spaces where you feel

28:49like you can make mistakes, and it's not that deep, that you sort of pick yourself up again. So one of the hardest things to do is speak Italian to my mum. Yeah. Because my mum, as she should, will sort of repeatedly correct me. And I think going through this book, even she's a little bit different now, I feel like she's a lot kinder with the sort of feedback that she gives back to me. But she also knows that I really want to learn and I want to be corrected. Yeah, that's a challenge. But sometimes you also want spaces where you can just flex the muscle and use it.

29:22Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have been really connected to the building Casa Italiana's Inn for a long time, because it's where I first started singing. My first job was, as I was a 14-year-old, singing at weddings and funerals for the Italian Catholic Church. Yeah. That's cute. Yeah. And to this day, every now and again, I still do it. So I've always gone to that church and the building and the other things that are in it. And there's this social club attached to it that was built in the 60s. And it was

29:53established to yet be a community centre for the migrant Italian community in London, in Clerkenwell, which is the historic Little Italy. So just like the New York Little Italy, there aren't really any Italians who live there anymore, sadly. I don't know if Little Italy in New York has a church. But I mean, we have a church that still, every Sunday, it is rammed full of Italians. It's not like there aren't Italians there. It's just they don't live there anymore. It's too expensive. There's a little Italy and Montreal as well. But I don't know how many people who are actually

30:24Italian live there or whether they've moved out to the outskirts. Yeah. And I had, I think I'd already started singing there again, because I really missed singing regularly. And so when I was around 30, or maybe late 20s, I started singing there again, like I had been as a teenager. And I saw this news story about the club, that it might have to shut down because sort of people weren't really going there anymore. Oh, no. People who, the volunteers there were struggling to keep it alive. And my mum spent her whole

30:58childhood there. Obviously, it's connected to the church that is very important for me in that I've sung there most of my life. I got married there last year as well. Oh. And a group of young people contacted the lead volunteer Massimo. And we're now a little sort of youth committee. And all of us have different ideas and things that we want to do to keep this community centre alive. My contribution was, I think we need, like people

31:30like me need a place to gather and meet and practice our Italian. And it doesn't only have to be for people like me, like Italo descendants, as it were, anyone who wants to come and practice Italian. When I was at uni, I did Spanish and Arabic language cafes, which were very informal get togethers that we did in our language groups. And yeah, you just like chat. Sometimes you'd get some homework done. Other times you're just chatting about random stuff, you're gossiping. And you can have like learners at all different levels and this kind of thing, or people who

32:01are from the places and just want to like help some learners for a little bit. Yeah. And I thought, okay, I'm a proper grown up now. And we have a bar. So rather than it being a Latin language cafe, we'll make it a language bar. But in Italy, a bar is sort of something different. You can get a coffee or a booze from a bar. That's true. Yeah. And so once a month, I have my next one in a couple of nights, but once a month, yeah, we all go and for two hours speak Italian. And when people come in, I explain to them that there are no rules. I just

32:33have three requests. And I say this all in Italian. And I judge, I judge that if they're new, I have to work out, are they understanding me? Do I have to repeat it in English? Do I just say in Italian? I sort of vibe off them. Yeah. And I say there are three requests. One, speak Italian. Two, make mistakes. And three, drink. Lovely. And the minute you sort of say drink, they're like, oh, they're like, oh, great. I'm safe here.

33:03I can do that. Yeah, I can do that. You know, even if my Italian isn't very good, at least I can order a coffee or a glass of wine or whatever they're going to get. Yeah. Yeah. And we have so many people come who come alone. We have people come in a little group. We have, there's an Italian class who come. They come as their social event that they do together. And they're all retired. We have real Italians, you know, we have Italians who haven't been in the UK very long, but they have to work, come, who just want an excuse to chat somewhere Italian. I don't

33:37know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like reconnect with other people from there. Yeah. Yeah. And they have a lot of patience, you know, and are really helpful for those of us who are learning. We have people who've done Italian at university and are very advanced, but don't get the opportunity to practice it anymore. We get lots of people like me, second, third generation, who do not speak Italian fluently and would like to. Loads of different kinds of people. We've even had people turn up who don't speak Italian at all, in which case I say, there's an Italian language bar. And they come because someone's told them it's a great night. And it's sort

34:10of not occurred to them. The memo has not quite gone through that. It's like, it's a great night. The person who told you it's a great night. It's all actually in Italian. It's all in Italian. Do they keep coming back and eventually learn more Italian or? Not yet, but we live in Speranza that they might do that. I know when I was learning ASL, American Sign Language, for a couple of years, and the classes were very encouraging of us. You need to go to deaf events and you need to practice with

34:43actual deaf people and fellow students. And even seeing other students who were a year ahead of me in the classes, I was like, oh, if I keep doing this, I could be that good in a year, even though they seem impossibly good to me now. So it was really helpful to have that kind of informal practice setting. Yeah. It's ideal for, as an adult learner, you need somewhere where you can actually sort of take quite a lot of autonomy and agency in the direction of your language learning. Because you are a grown up now, it's in your hands. But what support systems can be put in

35:18place to make that as convenient and easy as possible when you're also probably working hard, figuring out a way to pay rent or a mortgage, you know, it is a big time commitment, isn't it?

Language prestige and closing thoughts

35:29Yeah. Is there anything else that you've been inspired by in terms of the activists that you've learned in the group to try to put into your everyday life? I really love the idea. So the language solution in the CADUC chapter about the Master Apprentice program, when my working life is less hectic, and I always say this, you know, when it's less busy, and then why is it relentlessly, never-endingly busy? But when it's less busy, I would love to be able to just introduce more of a weekly rigor to my Italian and my

36:03Piazzante with my mum, a bit like the Master Apprentice program. I would really like to do that. So can you give us a little background on how that program works? Yeah. So essentially, two people are paid to make the time for exposure and contact with language, and it's between an elder and an apprentice learner. The idea being that you create another fluent speaker. So I would love to make more time in my life to spend more time with my mum and do that. That sounds really lovely. Yeah. So, Sophia, it's been such a pleasure having you on Lingthusiasm. If you could leave people

36:37knowing one thing about linguistics, what would that be? Oh, do you know what? This is something that I will do more work on because it fascinates me. But I want to leave you with the thought. It's not an answer. It's a provocation. I think one of the biggest shocks to me doing all of this and learning even in the UK about the rich language diversity of the UK and the madness that I wasn't taught more about it in school

37:08or even in the media, in public life, popular culture, etc. The fascination and obsession powerful people have with Greek and Latin but not with other languages blows my mind in a way that I just hadn't really taken seriously before I looked into this properly. So you can have the threat of taking Latin out of a Catholic mass drive the most powerful people in a country

37:43to write a letter, which is what happened here in the UK, about it, but that you can have other egregious sort of actual attacks on various languages and total radio silence. Yeah. That's just something I want to leave listeners with because you're now going to go into the ether and you're going to notice people talking about Greek and Latin, ancient Greek and Latin. And I want to invite you to think about, do you think that same person talking about ancient Greek or Latin and their fascination with it has this view about all language diversity or is it only around

38:16certain prestige languages? That's a great question. Yeah. For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned on this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode at lingthusiasm.com slash transcripts. You can get linguistic zines at lingthusiasm.com slash zines. And you can follow at Lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves

38:48with lots of linguistics patterns on them, including the IPA, branching tree diagrams, booban kiki, and our favorite esoteric unicode symbols. Plus other Lingthusiasm merch like our extremely cursed meat clarinet totes, t-shirts, and mugs at lingthusiasm.com slash merch. I can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com and I'm on social media as gretchenmcculloch.com on bluesky, at gretchen.mcculloch on Instagram. My blog is allthingslinguistic.com and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lauren's bluesky and blog is Superlingo. Our guest, Sophia Smith-Gaylor, is the author of How to Kill a Language, and you can follow her on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and her sub stack.

Patrons and show credits

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40:25Our production assistant is Martha Tsui-Billens. Our editorial assistant is John Crook. And our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is Ancient City by The Triangles. Stay Lingthusiastic!