Linguicide and the Fight to Save Endangered Languages

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

News stories about dying languages tend to follow a familiar formula.

You find that last elderly speaker and you race to record them before they’re gone.

But the bigger story is how and why language loss happens in the first place.

It’s the story of how a language gets pushed out from schools and courts and public life and kitchens and finally from the mouths of the next generation.

Well, there’s a compelling new book that does just that.

It’s called How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words.

The author, Sophia Smith Gaylor, is a British journalist.

She speaks several languages, and in the book, she writes about what’s called linguicide.

That’s the erasure or suppression of a language.

Sometimes that erasure is brutally obvious as with colonialism and occupation or laws criminalizing a mother tongue.

But sometimes it’s quieter when a language is left out of classrooms or denied prestige or treated as backward or just simply ignored.

Her reporting for this book takes her all around the world.

In Ghana she finds climate change finishing what colonialism started.

The farmers there watch the rainfall become unpredictable and the land dry out, and neighbors leave for the south, and when they do they stop speaking Dagbani.

In Northern California she meets people trying to preserve the indigenous Karuq language after U.S.

Policies forced children into boarding schools and punished them for speaking their native tongue.

She acknowledges that languages are forever changing, but she adds, the great tragedy of linguicide is that a community finds it is lost an entire language it never chose to part from, through a change it did not author.

Those languages aren’t just dictionaries, she says, they’re encyclopedias of cultural knowledge.

Now, all of this is profoundly personal for her because Smith Gaylor’s grandmother and mother both spoke to each other in a tongue that she grew up hearing but she never learned to speak herself.

They called it the dialect, and she had always assumed that it was simply a dialect of Italian.

And it’s only as an adult that she learned that what those two spoke was actually an endangered language itself.

It was indigenous to the mountains of northern Italy.

And so she writes movingly about what’s been called shared language erosion.

That’s when grandparents never master the language of their new country and grandchildren don’t learn the language of the old one, and the generation in the middle finds itself brokering between the two.

So grant this is a rigorous scholarly book, but it also packs a real emotional punch.

I had the good fortune recently to sit in an airport in Seattle next to one of the remaining speakers of a Native American language in Northern California.

And she is a dynamic, wonderful person who serves as an informant for academics around the world.

And she’s working so hard to preserve that language and make sure it’s recorded and accurate when it is recorded.

And when I think about linguicide, I think about her, I think about the energetic, exuberant, intelligent people who are out there trying to counteract the tide, who are trying to push back the ocean of ch of change that would wipe them out.

Mm-

Boy, that must have been some conversation.

It was incredible.

And it was kind of we happen to be sitting next to a British radio announcer who had his own or to put in, so it was very good.

Martha, that book and author again are the book is How to Kill a Language, Power, Resistance and the Race to Save our words.

It’s by Sophia Smith Gaylor.

We will put Smith Gaylor’s book on our website at waywordradio.org where we always include a link to the books that we mentioned on the show.

You can find that all again at waywordradio.org.