How to Kill a Language
Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words
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How to Kill a Language
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‘Beautiful, thought-provoking, and compelling’ SUSIE DENT
'An extremely moving, passionate plea' CAL FLYN
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As Sophia Smith Galer’s Nonna lay dying, she realised it wasn’t just a beloved grandmother she was losing – it was the language she spoke, too. From Northern Italy, she spoke a dialët that Sophia, like so many children and grandchildren of migrants, can understand but can’t speak. With the death of the language, Sophia would lose a culture, a history, an inheritance – a whole world.
This tragedy reaches far beyond her family. Globally we are witnessing an unprecedented mass extinction event. By the end of this century half of the world’s 7000 languages will be gone, killed by war, climate breakdown, migration, nationalism or neglect, along with the vital knowledge that they have sustained for centuries.
Award-winning journalist Smith Galer has journeyed across continents and generations to report from this disappearing world. From Ghana to Greece, Ecuador to Oman, California to the UK, she meets people experiencing this loss at first hand – but also campaigners and linguists who prove that a multilingual future is still possible. Her travels ultimately lead her back to where she began: to Italy, and the tiny mountainside village where the church bells still ring out for her Nonna.
How to Kill a Language is an impassioned investigation into a hidden global crisis, and a call to speak, read and write the languages of our world, before it’s too late.
©2026 Sophia Smith GalerResumo da Crítica
'Everyone should read this book. Impressively researched, full of empathy and a page-turner to boot' OLIA HERCULES
‘An extremely moving, passionate plea. A language is more than a dictionary or a system of grammar: it is an archive, a culture, a symbol. Sophia Smith Galer's fascinating book digs down into what it really means to translate, document, conserve, comprehend, colonise’ CAL FLYN, author of Islands of Abandonment
‘Sophia's curiosity and passion for language take us on a journey of linguistic discovery, leading us through the lessons of the past and the reality of the present, to the opportunities of the future’ LEN PENNIE, author of Poyums
‘Shines an intimate light on a pressing issue. How to Kill a Language tours the world with a personal touch, revealing the powerfully human stakes behind language death and revitalization’ ADAM ALEKSIC, author of Algospeak
'Hits the intersection of language and power as few other books have, with vivid reporting of how ‘linguicide’s broad scythe’ is cutting through communities worldwide … Sophia Smith Galer is the rare journalist who listens closely to endangered languages and brings them to life on the page' ROSS PERLIN, author of Language City
'Sophia Smith Galer is one of the UK's most impressive young journalists' GREG JENNER
‘This is the best book on language endangerment I have ever read. A love letter to languages … both intellectually rigorous and yet profoundly moving’ DAVID CRYSTAL, author of Language Death
‘Utterly fascinating, very topical and wide-ranging’ BIDISHA
'Smith Galer reveals that language is never neutral, it is a site of power. Immersive, personal and poetically precise … This is an urgent book about who gets to shape culture, and who refuses to disappear' MEGHA MOHAN, author of Herlands
'I’m so glad this book exists: language preservation and revitalization are causes sorely in need of a champion' DAVID PETERSON, author of The Art of Language Invention