Show notes
Michael Rosen talks to Sophia Smith Galer about the languages we're losing. She's found that by the end of this century half of the world’s 7000 languages will be gone, and she's travelled across the world to meet both the people who are experiencing this and those who are fighting to keep the words and the knowledge they hold alive. Sophia Smith Galer is the author of How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words. Produced for BBC Audio Bristol by Beth O'Dea, in partnership with the Open University.
Highlighted moments
in standard French the hair on your head is a them. It's plural.
“For 85 years, letters like Q and X were banned in official documents in Turkey because they don't appear in Turkish, but they do appear in Kurdish.”
“Covert language killing can often just look like neglect. Doing nothing to support a language for Tova Skutnab Kangas was equivalent to letting it die.”
Transcript
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