Linguicide And Language Extinction: Modernisation Is Killing Languages | Sophia Smith Galer

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]So linguists actually in a study that they did established that two of the factors that can contribute most heavily to language loss for a community are one the building of roads and two the lifting of their socioeconomic status.

[00:00:16]>> Our newsmaker this evening is Sophia Smith Gala an award-winning British journalist author and content creator.

[00:00:21]She's built a career at the intersection of traditional reporting and digital innovation focusing on subjects like language technology and culture. Uh in her latest work, How to Kill a Language, Galla examines the global crisis of language extinction. But before we speak to her, let's hear some languages facing extinction.

[00:01:03]that's um new from South Africa. Breton, a Celtic language from Britany and Ladino uh and the heritage language of the Sphartic Jews which was devastated by the Holocaust. Sophia Smith, Gala, welcome back to Times Radio. It's lovely to speak to you again and congratulations on the book. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

[00:01:24]>> Um let's um give our listeners an insight into why this is an issue to you. It's a personal issue to you. Um and the book starts with this. The death of your grandmother. Just tell me about your family's connection to language.

[00:01:38]>> Yes. So my non came to London in her early 20s and she'd left um the mountains of northern Italy in Piaensa.

[00:01:47]always described in family folklore as leaving miseria behind, the Italian word for poverty. And in her 90s when she was getting increasingly ill, I I was thinking more and more about how I wasn't only losing my non-nor, I was losing this rich linguistic soundsscape that I'd been raised around in in this this bilingual home of hers that I spent half my childhood in. Uh I didn't speak Italian, at least I thought I didn't speak Italian. And in my 20s when I tried repairing this connection to it, not only did I realize I I knew an awful lot more than I'd ever realized, I understood it while not speaking it, but I then speedily discovered that hang on a minute, the language that non-nom speak to each other isn't Italian. It's very [laughter] different to the language that I'm now learning and repairing my connection with. and I discovered it's a language called Emilia. Nona spoke the piazante, the piaensa variety of it and it's a a gallowalic language in the north of Italy. There are many regional languages in Italy and it is endangered and it is one of about three and a half thousand endangered languages around the world.

[00:03:05]Do we have accurate numbers on languages? I'm just thinking about how how hard it must be to collect every regional variation of language, every every language specific to um even even to a religion or to a section of people, a section of area. We know that there are 7,000, don't we, active languages and there a good deal of those around half is under threat by the end of the century. But is it is it possible to get accurate data on language? Even >> it's taken linguists, bearing in mind linguistics is a science and quite a young science, but it's taken linguists all of this time even to just establish that there are just over 7,000 languages spoken today. We still have not had linguists go out to all the corners of the world and document languages that they find themselves in close proximity to. And it's pretty unequal around the world. So some parts of the planet will have had quite a lot of linguist work, linguist fieldwork in uh and other parts of the world have not. So uh it's very likely for example with the continent of Africa we've so far wildly underestimated the number of languages that might be there. Um and the same goes for other parts of the world.

[00:04:30]Whereas if you take a country like for example the UK, the linguistic picture that we know we have here is probably very accurate.

[00:04:38]>> Yeah. And when we think about the UK, we think about Welsh naturally, don't we?

[00:04:43]Do we do we do a good job with preserving a language such as Welsh while forgetting that there are other languages? And and and do please tell us how many languages we have here in the UK.

[00:04:57]the the UK paints both an optimistic and devastating picture because obviously if you look at um one of the biggest historic legacies we've given the world which is the English language um that has had a a uh it was absolutely a weapon of colonialism. It will have led to the devalorization of many languages around the globe and indeed the devalorization of languages other than English in the UK.

[00:05:25]On the other hand, look at the revival of the Welsh language that we have had here. It was in the 1960s that uh Saunders Lewis, the Welsh politician, did a very famous broadcast where he said, "We're going to lose Welsh by the end of this the 20th century if we don't do anything about it. We'll need a revolution," he said, to to bring it back. And a revolution is what happened.

[00:05:51]Sometimes it's that rallying cry that can really motivate not only grassroots activity but institutions to put their weight behind languages that desperately need support. In the UK um of course we have all of the languages of the Celtic nations that everything from um Welsh too to Mans for example that would will be on the aisle of man. I'm thinking of Irish. I'm thinking of uh Scots, Gaic.

[00:06:20]Uh similarly we have Cornish and of course we also have Scots. So we have a lot of linguistic diversity here in the UK and and Ireland.

[00:06:31]>> Yeah. The death of language is described as linguisticide which is which is a curious quite effective word isn't it? But you embrace that.

[00:06:43]I embrace it because for me it's been a far more helpful lens with which to scrutinize languages coming under threat because a language can suffer linguisticide without being endangered.

[00:06:55]So to give two examples, really um obvious ones from geopolitics, but you have right now in Russian occupied areas of Ukraine, uh Russia will do everything to try and impose Russian language and devalorize Ukrainian language, making kids study uh in Russian mandated curriculums at school, for example, changing road signs from Ukrainian into Russian language is absolutely a weapon of war. Ukrainian has many, many, many millions of speakers. It's not an endangered language, but what I've just described to you is linguisticide. It's the forced suppression or erasia of a language in a place to a people. Uh Kurdish is another example. It's experienced great linguisticide and especially criminalization in Turkey where there have been in the past examples of teachers being put in prison accused of accused of um uh sort of dissensioned awful for teaching the Kurdish language which which is wild. Um language endangerment is yet again a another great threat that languages experience. And when I talk about linguisticide, it shifts the for me as a journalist, it it shifts the scrutiny to well, who's causing this? Languages don't get endangered or start disappearing of their own accord.

[00:08:18]Something disappears them. So my journey started with trying to figure out how is it that I grew up not speaking Italian?

[00:08:25]How is it that Emilia is endangered even in Italy? And then that search took me uh to four other continents as well to ask why languages in different places had their own experience of being disappeared. You've talked about the fight back um from um uh uh uh from people concerning languages and to go back to Ukraine. Um when Russia launched their full-scale invasion, we were told to move from Kiev to Kev. That was the West, that was news organizations, media organizations.

[00:09:03]I guess doing what we could to respect the fact that we needed to use Ukrainian language as much as possible and not a word that was born from from Russia.

[00:09:15]This was a very successful, you know, westernfacing campaign that took place in Ukraine. And just as you described, lots of us have shifted our pronunciation. uh Ukrainian cerillic.

[00:09:27]It's actually a little I'll you know I'll probably still unfortunately butcher the pronunciation but it with Ukrainian cerillic which has different sounds or phone names than say the Latin script or English has um it's a bit like k it's a little bit [clears throat] a little bit more like that. Um, but obviously it's a bit like how we say Paris and not Barry. Uh, so it's still a little bit of an exonym, but it's far far closer to the way that it is pronounced and spelled in Ukrainian than the Russian pronunciation and spelling.

[00:10:01]Exactly. And um, in Ukraine there are examples of incredible linguistic defense. So they have a state language commissioner who has been gathering examples of this linguisticide.

[00:10:17]Linguisticide is a little bit more of a popular term interestingly in Ukrainian than it is in English. No surprise given what the language has experienced. But uh the state language commissioner's job is to document examples of linguisticide and then take them uh to the international court as part of the evidence of genocide. So for for some of you know some listeners who might not have experience of multilingualism or might not have direct experience of language endangerment uh for many countries in the news all the time linguisticide is a everpresent active harm uh that speakers go through.

[00:10:58]>> Yeah. Um we are I think getting worse at languages here in this country.

[00:11:04]Certainly when you look at at state schooling you've given you know various theories for the destruction the the death of language you know there are systemic state policies economic structures climate disruption societal shame. But if we if we focus on systemic state policies, um it is just as important is it not to not only look at any languages associated with your family and keep language traditions going, but it's also important to develop the skill to learn language because although they might be more mainstream languages, it does it does hit an area of our brain, doesn't it? learning languages that nothing else does. And it's no longer mandatory to do a language at GCSE as it as it was in my day. And around 20 25% of 14y olds don't continue to learn a language because they don't feel suited to a language.

[00:12:00]They don't get on with learning it. And so they can drop it when they um choose their GCSE subjects. Why was that decision made? Do you think it it can't make sense to you?

[00:12:12]It was a decision that was made in 2004.

[00:12:15]The language requirement that you were describing was was dropped by the labor labor government at the time. I've understood I would have only been 10 years old myself, but I have understood it was done because um it it it was a way possibly to sort of raise marks across the board because it meant that people who always sort of selfidentified as being bad at languages were no longer forced to go through that experience.

[00:12:40]Uh, unfortunately that's that's probably an indictment on on how languages are taught more than human beings inherent ability to learn languages. Lots of us, including myself, find maths challenging. That has never meant that I shouldn't be encouraged to do a maths GCSE. And I I would apply the same logic to languages. Intriguingly though, let's contemplate for a moment.

[00:13:07]uh physical exercise, PE, that's a subject I had to do throughout my entire school life. Uh I never had to do a GCSE in it, but it was a curriculum requirement because of the mental and physical benefits associated with it.

[00:13:23]Uh, is the is it radical to suggest that language learning could be better introduced into young people's curriculums, not necessarily always in a heavily examined way or offer options beyond only examined ways where [clears throat] you you you can feel when you're learning a language without the the worry or or the worry or shame that may surround a bad mark, it can be incredible. And really interestingly in Sweden they have a um heritage language system. So so young people who uh I think you only need a couple of people in a region to sort of qualify for the state to fund that you can somehow find education a mother tongue language instruction as part of your average school week and you c you are expected to take an exam in it but if you get a bad mark it does not have to contribute to your school grade. M >> so it it's it recognizes that m heritage language maintenance is important to children regardless of the mark that they might get at the end and that a bad mark should never put them off either.

[00:14:31]>> And when I read about that I thought gosh imagine if I could have accessed language and more language learning at school that wasn't only through through the lens of a tough examination system.

[00:14:42]>> Yeah. And also a limited number of languages to learn as well. Has digitization killed language? The need to conform to the different text or the different font? It isn't font, isn't it? It's language options on a computer. And actually, will AI help with that in the future? Could AI reignite the love of discovering language or even intrigue about about speaking other languages?

[00:15:12]Something that digitization did uh and indeed generally speaking increased liter literacy rates around the world is it forced languages that were happily just oral traditions for hundreds maybe even longer than that years. Uh it forced them to acquire a writing system and it forced them to start producing documentation some languages more than others. uh to your point about different scripts turning up on the internet, there are still struggles to for example get Erdu, the language of Pakistan digitized. Um so there are still many like massively very widely spoken languages um that the sort of Latinbased computing systems are still struggling to handle. And it's up to very clever developers and speakers of these languages uh to come up with very creative ways of of building tools that could better better lubricate communion on communication online. AI like any tech is a is a tool that humans use. Uh it's up to us to use it and promote use for good and scrutinize and and prevent use for bad. Unfortunately, with a number of AI translation tools that I've seen, um, I've seen quite a lot of inaccurate translations and rather than tools simply saying, "Sorry, don't have the answer. Don't have enough training data to give you an accurate answer," they will come up with an answer anyway, possibly giving inaccurate information about a vulnerable minority language, very heavily endangered that you might now accidentally fill the internet with inaccurate language on. Um, so there are I I've personally seen interesting and wholesome examples from PE language activists in community really focused on data sovereignty and responsible tech design. And then I've seen other places including big tech who should know better creating tools with AI that that shouldn't exist because they've not gone through the right checks.

[00:17:19]>> Susan's just been in touch. I know of parents who pulled their children out of French GCSE is they didn't want to fail on record. There needs to be better teaching and variety. And we've been speaking about the death of language. I wonder whether there there is an acceptance though that throughout the centuries um language has has come and gone. There have certainly been well I don't know are we have we have we gone from a point of having more language than ever before to having less now or as the centuries have gone by have we have we developed and adopted new languages? I was trying to get my head around it earlier is the amount of languages we we have available is that does that ever only decrease Sophia or have there been instances and could there be in the future new languages?

[00:18:09]Bear in mind that there have not been standard languages for very long. There have only been national languages as long as we've had nation states. Uh so in many cases, languages as you and I understand them is so influenced by by the systems that are now in our society.

[00:18:27]That's not how languages ever used to behave. Languages as I argue in the book, they defy oceans. They defy borders. um to to the point even my my non's own language it's in Italy but it's technically almost sort of genetically more French than it is Italian because languages ignore borders >> um and standardization which is required really for literacy uh is something that has been undertaken over the last for some languages it's been 500 years or sort of since the printing press especially in Europe and other cases where writing and documentation's only really started in the last 50 years. Um, absolutely we are seeing an unprecedented funneling and diminishing of the world's language diversity that's being compounded by that was compounded in the age of empire and sort of the gross decimation of peoples around the world and their communities and then with globalization.

[00:19:29]So linguists actually in a study that they did established that two of the factors that can contribute most heavily to language loss for a community are one the building of roads and two the lifting of their socioeconomic status.

[00:19:45]>> Interesting. And that's because with roads, with more money, with more access to opportunities and better connection to the wider world, uh you effectively introduce a language hierarchy often to the place. A language h a language from further away is conceived of as being more prestigious, more likely to open up opportunity to you. And commonly regional languages begin to be construed perhaps as languages that are not deemed as valuable or useful. And when you look at language activism and you look at places that have been able to maintain very healthy and excellent bilingualism, they essentially put protections in place and valorization in place to make sure that in learning languages associated with greater socioeconomic opportunity or you know global communication now we live in a globalized world that learning that language does not mean you lose the language that connects you to your family, to your grandmother, to your people, to your place.

[00:20:52]>> Sophia, it's been really enlightening.

[00:20:54]Thank you. It's a great book. Thank you very much. I've been enjoying reading it, and that's a fascinating insight.

[00:20:58]There's much more, by the way, uh in the book. Uh it is called How to Kill a Language: Power Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words. Uh we've been hearing from Sophia Smith Gala, who's on a book tour, so uh please do check her out on that as well. Sophia, we'll speak to you soon. Thank you. Great pleasure to have you with us.