Sophia Smith Galer's 'How to Kill a Language' Examines the Ethics of Language Death

Key facts

• Sophia Smith Galer's 'How to Kill a Language' published by Crown.
• 2023 earthquake in Turkey and Syria killed over 50,000 people; Kurdish translation not provided.
• Kurdish is spoken by about 15 million Turkish citizens.
• Putin's 2021 essay characterized Ukrainian as a dialect of Russian; invasion followed in 2022.
• Russian forces have torn down Ukrainian road signs and insisted on Russian in schools.
• Catherine the Great banned Ukrainian-language church services in 1784.
• Kichwa speakers in Ecuador face colonial contempt; language death from choices to stop speaking to children.
• Galer's own Emilian dialect (Emigliän dialët) lost because family spoke to her in English in London.
• David Crystal's term 'cultural assimilation' describes pressure to assimilate linguistically.
• Prostratin, a potential HIV treatment, discovered via Samoan traditional knowledge.
• Iwaidja language in northern Australia has distinct words for two dolphin species.
• Communities in Canada with Aboriginal language fluency have low to zero youth suicide rates; where fewer than half speak the language, suicide rates six times higher.
• Welsh is now an official language of Wales, spoken by about a sixth of the population; goal of 1 million speakers by 2050.
• Scottish Gaelic has about 70,000 fluent speakers, mostly elderly.
• Hebrew revival is a unique success; language with few native speakers for 2,000 years became first language of Israel.
• American federal government has earmarked $180 million for language revitalization since 2005.
• Karuk master-apprentice program pays learners $15/hour stipend.
• Academy of Mayan Languages in Guatemala controversy over reforestation project in 1992.
• India's constitution recognizes 22 languages; 'three-language formula' in schools.
• Standard Kurdish has two forms: Kurmanji (Latin script) and Sorani (Arabic script).
• Ukrainian built on Poltava-Kyiv dialect; Rusyn treated as dialect within Ukraine.
• Kichwa descends from Quechuan language of Inca empire; Cañari language went extinct.
• French republican project suppressed languages like Occitan, Breton, Basque; children wore slates saying 'Je parle Breton' as late as 1949.
• Isaiah Berlin argued no social world without loss; politics is managing loss.
• Freud distinguished mourning from melancholia; linguistic preservation literature can be melancholic.