120: How (not) to kill a language - Interview with Sophia Smith Galer

Gretchen McCulloch (0:20)

Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And today, we're getting enthusiastic about many ways people are fighting to reclaim their languages around the world, with Sophia Smith Galer, who's a journalist and content creator whose work focuses on language, technology, and culture. She's the author of How to Kill a Language, and she's based in London, UK.

But first, our most recent bonus episode takes you behind the zines. We've been having fun making several different linguistics-themed zines, and now we chat with our very own technical editor, Leah Velleman, about the work she's been doing with me behind the scenes to bring those Lingthusiasm zines to life. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to listen to this and over 100 bonus episodes, and also to see and give comments on the next zines before anyone else.

Hi, Sophia. Welcome to Lingthusiasm.

Sophia Smith Galer (1:22)

Hello. Thank you so much for having me.

Gretchen McCulloch (1:24)

Thank you for being here. Before we get into your work and your book, we're going to start with the question we ask all of our guests, which is, how did you get interested in linguistics?

Sophia Smith Galer (1:34)

I loved languages before I ever loved journalism. It was the first thing that I studied.

I did Spanish and Arabic as my undergraduate degree, and before that had spent my childhood and adolescence being fascinated. By the languages that were available to me. So in my school, that was Spanish, French and Latin. Then at home, I grew up listening to my mum and my non-nurse speak to each other in a glittering array of languages. In the book we're about to discuss, I quite naively thought that that was English and Italian, and there in fact was another language hiding in there, lying in wait for me.

I really had quite a rich linguistic soundscape growing up, and then through all of my student experiences, and I went on to become an international news reporter. My languages came in pretty handy, but maybe not as often as you'd think they would be in demand. But perhaps that's because I worked in a British newsroom where everyone's very focused on English.

Gretchen McCulloch (2:44)

Yeah. There's a lot of reporting on things happening in other countries, but interviewing people who speak English in those countries or things like that?

Sophia Smith Galer (2:51)

Yeah, exactly. I can remember both. I had two newsroom jobs. One was at the BBC and the other was at Vice News.

I can remember scenarios in both reporter roles where I found a story because I was the first English speaking journalist to identify it because I had been able to access it in the target language as it were.

Gretchen McCulloch (3:17)

That's really helpful. Yeah.

Sophia Smith Galer (3:18)

Yeah, really helpful. I can remember instances where I was perhaps able to build rapport quite quickly with someone because I could tell we had a language in common. It came in useful in sneaky, surprising instances. But it's not like day-to-day I had editors saying, hey Sophia, we could use some of your language skills right now, please. That didn't happen as often as I had hoped it would. I was always really interested in language, but it became this tool in my wider skill set that was sometimes used, sometimes underused. I desperately tried to keep them going.

It was in 2019 when I became the first BBC journalist to use TikTok.

I was a video journalist at the time. It was quite different for journalists to be using it at that point. I was one of the only ones in the UK, never mind the only one at the BBC. The only person really doing it properly was Dave Jorgensen at the Washington Post famously in the US.

Gretchen McCulloch (4:24)

I remember that guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sophia Smith Galer (4:26)

Yeah.

I did it for a bit. I basically kept going viral.

I kept getting into trouble for not doing anything naughty at the BBC because the BBC is just like that. I kept being told just to be careful with my TikToks, even though they were never breaking any guidelines. Then eventually I got told, please stop putting BBC journalism on there. I thought, okay, well, I can't put BBC journalism on there, but that doesn't mean I can't TikTok full stop. I started making language explainers because I loved languages. They were my biggest hobby and passion. I thought, well, okay, if I can't talk about my work, what else do I know about? I started making video explainers about language, and that's how I properly got into the linguistics space.

Gretchen McCulloch (5:16)