How to Kill a Language - Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words

Sophia Smith Galer realised as her Italian Nonna lay dying that it wasn’t just her beloved grandmother she was losing – it was the language she spoke, too. Her grandmother was from Northern Italy and used a dialect that Sophia could understand but was not herself able to speak. Like so many children and grandchildren of migrants, she was losing a culture, a history, an inheritance. This personal story is happening all around the world at scale - a mass extinction of languages. By the end of this century half of the world’s 7000 languages will be gone, killed off by war, climate breakdown, migration, nationalism or neglect, along with the vital knowledge that they have sustained for centuries.

Smith Galer has travelled extensively to research this phenomenon, finding common ground with others across the globe who are experiencing the same loss. She also meets linguists and campaigners who seek to halt and reverse this terrible erosion of culture and to preserve a multi-lingual future. How to Kill a Language is an important investigation into a hidden global crisis and an impassioned cry to speak, read and write the languages of our world before they are lost forever.

Hardback, 304 pages
Measures 16.2 x 24.3 x 2.9cm