Language Extinction

Introduction

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Owls and Language

2:06Hello. I was once talking to a farmer in France about owls. There are parts of the French countryside where you can hear the calls of three different owls. The one we call the barn owl. Then there's the tawny owl or hoot owl. And then the little owl. The barn owl can make a screech, but rather disconcertingly, it can also make what sounds like heavy breathing. The hoot owl is the one we say goes to it to woo. But what calls does the little owl make? Well, the farmer and I were discussing this

2:36and imitating the sounds of the owls in our respective languages, English and French. In the midst of this, the farmer explained to me that the little owl is saying something with one of its calls. What's that, I said. And he switched languages from French to what some French people call patois and some call oxytan. He said that in patois, the little owl calls out to young women to tell them to get their hair done because they're going to get married in the morning. All this is compressed into one phrase. Coiffe-la. And he imitated the little owl as he said it.

3:12Coiffe-la. Coiffe-la. Those of you who know standard French will know that in standard French you could say coiffe-le to mean the same thing. Similar but different. All over the world you can tell similar stories where people in a locality can say something one way and there's a standard version for another way. Sometimes it's a matter of pronunciation, sometimes of vocabulary, sometimes of grammar or any combination of these. In this case, coiffe-la, it's both pronunciation and grammar

3:44because in patois there's the word la meaning it, but in standard French it's le meaning them. And that's because in standard French the hair on your head is a them. It's plural. Just a tiny difference, you might say. But is it a difference between a standard French expression that means everyone's hair everywhere and a local expression that means something connected to a people in this place, in this time, linked to the animals and plants and landscape around them? Now, that part of France

4:17has seen a big decline in Occitant, patois. There'll be a time, let's say, in the next 20 or 30 years where no one in that place will know the story of coiffe-la, attached to the little owl. In that sense, it will have died out. And this is happening all over the world. Languages dying out, faster and faster. My guest today is a journalist, creator and broadcaster who's travelled all over the world studying the fate of our languages. And she's the author of a book, How to Kill a Language, Power,

4:49Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words. She is Sophia Smith-Gaylor and I'm very pleased to say

Guest Introduction

4:54Sophia joins me now. Welcome to the programme, Sophia. Thank you for having me. Can we begin by talking about your grandmother, your nonna and her influence on your work? Of course, a major influence on everything about me. My nonna came here after the Second World War. She migrated to London. It's where she met the man who actually came from a village on the valley, but met him here in London, where she got married here, had my mum and my uncle. And nonna came from Piacenza, but very rural Piacenza in the

5:33mountains. And which part of Italy is that? Plenty of our listeners will know Italy quite well. This is right at the end of a long Roman road in Emilia-Romagna. So if you go to the end of that road, you find Piacenza, the city. And then if you venture a little further out beyond the city, you find the mountains, the Apennines of Italy. And my nonna is from a valley in those Apennines. Now, tell us about her language.

Family Language

5:59Growing up, when I used to hear mum and nonna talk in, well, a language, not English, I assumed they were speaking to each other in Italian. And it was only really in my 20s, as I began to better explore Italian and my heritage, that I realised, oh, I actually think they speak this other language. Because right now I'm looking at a map of the languages of Italy, and I'm discovering there's far more language diversity there than I had ever realised. And they always spoke about some of the words that they said as

6:33il dialetto, which in and of itself is not an Italian word. The word for dialect in Italian would be il dialetto. So already they were using a different word to describe dialect. And I discovered it wasn't a dialect at all. Or if it was a dialect, it was a dialect of a language that was not Italian. So let's wind back to your childhood. Let's find you maybe at the tea table or the dinner table, or I don't know, just going out. And your nonna and your mum talk to you. Do they talk to you

7:04in this language? Nonna would always speak to me in English, unless she was talking about food, or unless she was saying terms of endearment. My little pechug, that would have been dialetto, which just sort of means little, little thing. And that word, is there an Italian, standard Italian equivalent? Piccolo, piccolina, like little, little one. So it's quite different. Give me the two side by side so I could... Pechug, yeah. And piccolina.

7:35Yeah, piccolina. Pechug, pechughe, pechughena, and piccola, piccolina. Yeah, so already quite different, but formed with diminutives, you know, in the same way. And when nonna would speak to my mum about me... How would she say it in the dialect? Yeah, she'd always talk about la fiola. That's you, is it? That's me. And in standard Italian, that'd be la figlia. So hopefully at this point, you're already hearing some sort of quite fronted vowel sounds.

8:07Up the front of the mouth. Yeah, that in standard Italian do not tend to be used. I always thought it sounded a bit like sort of a very angry, accented sort of French way of speaking almost, because there's that strong nasality in the sound that, in my ignorance, I associated with, oh, that sounds a bit more French than it sounds Italian. Is there a reason for that? Was there a French influence in that part of Italy? Well, when you look into the language that nonna spoke, which would have absolutely been a variety

8:42of Emilian or Emiliano, linguists now understand these languages to be gallo-italic, gallo-romance languages. So actually, you were just talking about Occitan, the language that my nonna spoke would not have been too far away from Occitan if you looked at a language family tree. And they are far closer to each other as examples, Occitan and Emilian, than Emilian and Italian. Yes. So I see you sailing through a gate armed with these languages in order to find out about

Language Diversity

9:15the languages of the world. So tell me, how many languages are there in the world right now? Do you know that fact at your fingertips? There are over 7,000. Yes. Alive, 7,000 living languages. And have we got a sense of how fast they're running out? Linguists estimate that by the end of this century, we'll have probably lost about half of that language diversity. Some linguists are far less conservative, and they think that

9:45it could be anything from 50 to 90% of languages are at risk. But they're disappearing very, very quickly. And I think it makes a lot of sense when you try and take a step back and look at where we are in history. We're at the tail end of a vast colonial period. We're at only the very beginning of a digital revolution that is already transforming and has transformed our lives, which in turn followed an industrial revolution. Languages are disappearing faster

10:16than ever before, because all of these things are happening at the same time. The world, by and large, has globalised. It's only globalising further. And linguistic diversity in a world where modern nation states have consolidated, many of them around policies of one nation, one language. When you look at how there are many economic incentives for communities to learn a prestige language. Mostly English and Spanish. Yeah. And Mandarin.

10:47Exactly. A macro language of which those are absolutely. You can quickly see how a family language, one that carries a lot of cultural capital for you, may be deprioritised, devalued. So, add all of these things together with a couple of other reasons that I explore, and you have very rapid, unprecedented loss of language diversity. Just take us in your book there. You talk of 10 languages. What are the 10 languages?

11:21So, I first use Italian to explore how languages die in diaspora. Then I move on to how language can be killed off in the exercise of nation building. So, I look at loss of language diversity in Oman. Quite a young country is an example of that. And I look at the language of Kleret, which is one of the modern South Arabian languages in the South. I look at what happens to language rights and language in war. And I take the example of Ukrainian and what has happened in Russian

11:53occupied areas of Ukraine during the current conflict. I look at Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language that came from Iberia, to also look at what happens to languages when they are expelled, when their speakers are expelled from a country, which is absolutely a way of killing a language as well. I look at colonialism and what happens to a people when they and their lands are exploited, as has happened in the United States. And I look at a Californian language, Karuk, which certainly

12:24when I wrote the book, had 12 living speakers remaining. I look at Quechua, which is a language you will find spoken in Ecuador. It's part of the macro Quechua language. And that tells a story of shame. In that chapter in particular, I actually use an Occitan word because it's from Occitan and the language rights movement that's come from that community, a word vergonya, shame. And I look at

12:56how shame is preventing many people in the Quechua community from wanting to teach the language to their children. In my chapter called Sanctify, it kind of takes a little bit of a different swerve because I look at a language that is so often spoken about as sort of the only language that's ever been brought back from the dead. And that would be Hebrew. And I sort of debunk that slightly. That's, I would describe that as a kind of half truth representation of the language. But it was, it was effectively

13:29fossilised. It was trapped in amber when it was turned from a vernacular language into a language that represented a faith and I explore how that happens. I then look at what happens when you ignore a language. That's a chapter that really looks a lot at climate change and what linguists are trying to do now. This is, this is very contemporary. It's quite a novel area of research, but the linguists who amidst widespread language endangerment are also worrying about languages being hurt by climate change and

14:00people being either forced from areas because of natural disasters or the actual drip by drip movement of a population as, as climate migrants have to leave what they know. So for that, I go to Ghana and I look at Dagbani, which is a very, very vivacious language. There are lots of speakers. If you look at the birth rate, you could argue it's a growing language rather than a disappearing one, but an increased number of climate migrants from the area in which Dagbani is spoken may mean that certainly in the cities of

14:32Ghana where you can't learn Dagbani at school, like we've seen in so many of the other chapters and stories in my book, it, it may disappear from communities. I, of course, in a book called How to Kill a Language, look at Kurdish for an entire chapter because of the great linguicide that that language has experienced and, you know, the many massive dialects that are within Kurdish because it's almost inaccurate to really even name it one language, but I look at how it's been criminalised, especially in Turkey, over its history. And then the final chapter is called Remember and I go back

15:06to Italy for that chapter to look at my nonna's language, which is a variety of Emilia called Piazante. Now, predictably, people might say, so what? I'll play devil's advocate. I mean, what's the point? It doesn't matter as long as you can communicate. And we've got lots of ways of communicating. We can summarise the way we speak. We can use our hands. I can remember when I was nine or ten and in France and I spent a whole day with a little French boy and we managed to get on very well and I couldn't speak any French and he couldn't speak any English. So why does it matter? Go on, convince me.

15:42Languages are easy to imagine as dictionaries because they're the big books that we associate with language. And I think it's a lot more helpful to think of languages as encyclopaedias. They carry immense banks of cultural capital and knowledge. They are also a really important marker of identity.

16:05It might be hard for any of us speaking or listening who are, who would describe ourselves as monolingual English speakers, as an example, because to think that your language could ever disappear is an intellectual exercise. It's not going to happen. English is not going to disappear. Absolutely not in our lifetimes, at least. But to someone for whom, for example, when I think about my attachment to the language that my mum speaks and my nonna spoke, to think about that being lost brings great sorrow. I think it's a tragedy.

16:37And it is in a family, isn't it? I mean, where do we live? We live in family networks. There may not be two up, two down type families, but we live in family networks. So that's where they actually get lost face to face, isn't it? Absolutely. When linguists look at the vitality of a language, how well is it spoken? They will look at transmission between parents and children. Absolutely. As we see in many diasporas, it's something that the linguist Joshua Fishman called the three generation model. You will see

17:12in diaspora, a language disappears in three generations. So take, let's take, imagine a young person who is migrating to a new country. Imagine my nonna when she was younger, who spoke Italian, her regional language as well, and learned English while she was here. She has my mum and my uncle. My mum becomes very proficiently bilingual, often acting as a language broker, actually, between London and my nonna, helping her out. My mum then has me, and I effectively have become completely

17:47monolingual towards English, totally losing the ability to speak Italian. With bits thrown in. With bits thrown in, of course. And I have come to understand how my exposure to Italian did form me in a certain way. It didn't make me a productively bilingual person, but I certainly got a lot of receptive bilingualism from being raised around Italian. It's part of who you are, isn't it?

Language Loss Discussion

18:11Absolutely. But we've got this three generation model that is repeated all over the world, isn't it? And there will be many, many grandchildren in my position who understand the family language, but do not speak it. And what will happen when I have children, if I have children, the only way I would be able to pass on Italian, for example, would be if I build productivity with it now. Or talk them to Italian lessons and then instead of saying bread and have your bread now and have your bread and butter, just literally the bread and butter, the stuff of life. That's

18:43why I chose that. You would be saying it in Italian. I've seen families do that. I've seen as a friend of ours. He's German. And he spoke when the children were growing up, he spoke to them in German, but he was bilingual himself. He could speak perfect English, but he spoke to them in German. So they had the German from his family. He made a point of that. And one of the reasons, one of the reasons people do this is so that the children can speak to the grandparents back from where people come. So it's a way of being able to speak to grandparents.

19:15So let's go into your book a bit more, drill into it. Can I home in on one of the factors you talked about, which is shame. Now that really interests me a lot. In my family, the language of my great grandparents, and to a certain extent my grandparents, was Yiddish. And one of the reasons why people stopped speaking Yiddish was because it was regarded as an inferior language, that it wasn't as correct as High German, Hochdeutsch. There was somehow or other it was a broken language or inferior. And you had somebody like Wagner

19:46who poured scorn on it, said you can't express passion through Yiddish. And at the same time people thought because it was the new country, then you must speak the language of the new country, British English or American English and so on. So tell me about more about shame in the example that you give. People becoming ashamed of their own language. It's very powerful, isn't it, as an idea. What you just described, especially in Diaspora as well, where if you live in a country where assimilation means monolingual English, really, rather than preserving bilingualism, of course

20:20that's going to happen. Doesn't necessarily follow it would be shame, though, does it? I mean, the idea that if you say this word or this phrase, that somehow or other you're letting yourself down or it looks bad, doesn't necessarily follow it. You were just describing almost listing or positing languages against each other in terms of what value they offer. So in the description that you were just giving about how Yiddish could have been conceived of as an inferior language, that's a value judgment that's been passed on

20:51the language. That's not remotely linguistic. It is not linguistic to say one language is more valuable than the other. It makes no sense. You know what I mean? But some people do believe that. Some people do believe that one language is inferior to another and that passes down to some people who speak the language and they, in psychological terms, introject it. They then say, my language is inferior. It came out in the chapter where I look at shame in Ecuador, where I looked at what's happened with the Kichwa language. Even amidst government support of indigenous languages in Ecuador in

21:24the 80s, 90s, there's research that shows how teachers were still saying things like the grammar of Kichwa is weaker than Spanish, which is untrue. You can't say that about one language compared to another. Grammar is grammar. Yeah, grammar is grammar. It might look different. It might behave differently, but grammar is grammar. And a lot of these attitudes about how Kichwa, you know, you wouldn't want to teach your child Kichwa, but you do want them to learn Spanish, English. A lot of these ideas are passed

21:54down and absorbed from the colonial era in which these languages were really, really minoritised and really demonstrably hurt by, in this case, the imperial Spanish state. And if you begin to associate speaking Kichwa with your grandparents who lived in poverty, if you begin to associate Kichwa as a language of the past, not of the future. Or of the defeated language, because you accompany the loss of the language with the military defeat.

22:28I mean, the whole story of the conquistadores, you know, it's a terrifying story, but I mean, you're a defeated people. So is there an element? I mean, this happened in, with indigenous languages in North America and in Australia, where you are the defeated people. So what are you hanging on to? Certainly what came out in my interviews with Kichwa speakers was that culture had been so stratified. So the Kichwa speakers were the underclass, and the Spanish speakers were the overlords.

23:01Certainly in Ecuador's case, where you're looking at an indigenous movement, that is still, I think, only less than 50 years old. That's compared to about 500 years of linguicide. It's an awful lot to overcome. In the title of your book, you talk about languages being killed. You are allowed hyperbole in your titles. Is that OK? Would you hold to that term and say that's what's happening to languages, they're being killed? So that chapter list I just walked through was very intentional, because each chapter is a different weapon of murder.

23:35It's a different way in which a language is being killed.

23:39That suggests instrumentation, though, doesn't it? It does suggest motive. You know, murder has motive. Manslaughter, the motive is not necessarily there. Absolutely. I'm leaning towards manslaughter. You want murder, do you? In the 80s and 90s, there was a linguist who coined the term linguicide, Tova Skutnab Kangas. And when she walked through the different ways in which a language could be killed, she looked at both overt and covert linguicide.

24:12An example of overt linguicide would be a law banning a language, someone being thrown into jail because they've spoken a particular language. Where's that happened? That has absolutely happened with Kurdish. It's especially happened in Turkey. 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. So you have rules like that. You have teachers, language activists being thrown into prison.

24:45That's a pretty obvious story there of linguicide and overt language killing. 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. And I say in the book that you can perhaps look at it as manslaughter rather than murder, but obviously it does have the same result. The language dies. And that's happened with Welsh, Gaelic and Irish in the 19th century.

25:15The different versions, Cornish and the Manx language. I mean, it's happened right here. I mean, near to where we're talking. It's happened here. And I would massively argue that linguicide has happened here. We have had Welsh not. You know, we've had these campaigns and policies within schools where children would face, you know, they would be hit if they spoke Welsh. But we have we absolutely have covert language killing here as well.

25:46Even if you think about some of the attitudes that we've heard, even only very recently about language diversity in the UK communities being vilified if they at home they speak a language other than English, which has certainly been an idea courted by more right wing politicians at the moment. That's covert. It's still linguicide. So what would you like to happen? I'm giving you a magic wand, handing it to Sophia. If we met again in the future, let's say 10, 20 years time on the programme, welcome to Word of Mouth, 20 years time.

26:19What would you like to happen? What would you like to talk about in 20 years time? What would I like to happen? I would love to see more access to better funded mother tongue and heritage language education here in the UK and in countries like the UK. It's often really grassroots efforts and parents who are already pushed for time and money desperately trying to maintain the heritage languages that they or their parents brought to the UK. And I think we could be doing a lot more to be giving those families support on a broader level, looking at the world and the rapid language loss that we're in the middle of.

27:00We will not stop that from happening. So a lot of the languages, which we know are very heavily endangered, and certainly if they're spoken in communities where there's no interest in maintaining the language anymore, because not enough support was given when it should have been. Those languages are going to disappear. There are languages that have disappeared, that are being revitalised. There are languages that still have some native speakers remaining, and we're in a race against the clock to record them, document their language and make sure it is preserved so that the language may be reclaimed or revived.

27:45Ultimately, the story of linguicide is that languages are cut before their time. And in some cases, communities might feel sad about that, but actually fairly unbothered. And I would even describe Piacenza and a lot of the attitudes I found around my nonna's language there as one of these cases. But in other places, there are communities really, really desperate to cling on to this language that they can see is fast disappearing. So I would like to see more support for those efforts to make sure that these languages stay with us, because that represents the wishes of the language's last remaining custodians.

28:24When I think of language loss in my family, I think of how Yiddish, well, it virtually disappeared in just three generations. And Word of Mouth is partnered with The Open University, and their linguists interviewed me about my own languages. And listeners, if you'd like to hear that, go to the BBC Radio 4 Word of Mouth page and follow the links to The Open University. Feel your best and amplify your everyday look with Thrive Cosmetics. Go to thrivecosmetics.com slash shine26 for an exclusive offer of 20% off your first order. That's Thrive Cosmetics, C-A-U-S-E-M-E-T-I-C-S dot com slash shine26.

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29:25So, Sophia Smith-Gaylor, I'd like to say thanks very much for coming on the programme. Now, is there a way of saying goodbye, farewell, that you've come across in your travels that you were particularly struck by? I want to leave you with a thought which came up during my time in Oman, when I was interviewing speakers and learners of Claret. I had a learner tell me that there was no word for goodbye. There was no word for goodbye to learn.

29:57Arabic does have a word, goodbye, mat salama, which is sort of with peace, if I were to directly translate it. And I remember her talking about or theorising perhaps why there was no expression for goodbye in this language. And she believed there was no word for goodbye because there's no reason for us to not see each other again. And I would say the same to you, Michael. There's no reason that we're not going to say hello again. 102 miles ago, the oil light came on.

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