Why to Save a Language

**Kusha Navadar** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show. I'm Kusha Navadar, filling in for Brian today here on WNYC.
What happens when a language dies, and why should we care? Linguists and academics around the world estimate that there are more than 7,000 known living languages, but of those 7,000, nearly half of them are considered endangered, meaning less than 1,000 speakers of that language are left. In a recent piece for The Guardian, our next guest writes that language loss is predicted to triple in the next 40 years without intervention. She argues that when we lose languages, we don't just lose ways of speaking, but ways of thinking and seeing the world.
With me now is Sophia Smith Galer, UK-based journalist and the author of the new book, How to Kill a Language, Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words. Sophia, welcome to WNYC.

**Sophia Smith Galer** (1:02)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Kusha Navadar** (1:05)
Sophia, the first endangered language you encountered was inside your own home. What happened?

**Sophia Smith Galer** (1:10)
Yeah. So I was in my late 20s and my nonna was in her early 90s. My nonna came to London when she was about 20 herself from the mountains in Piacenza in Northern Italy. And growing up, I naively assumed, oh, yeah, nonna and mom, whenever they speak to each other, they speak to each other in Italian.
I went on this journey in my 20s, really trying to reconnect with lost Italian. I didn't speak it. I could understand it only. And as I was learning more about Italian, I realized they don't speak Italian. They really do speak a different language. And as I investigated a bit more, I realized that this, the Alut, as they called it, were actually talking about a language in its own right, not a dialect, it was not only another language, it was endangered. So just as you said, it was a big shock as I was looking at the languages of Italy, realized that not only was my nonnose language, a language in its own right, it was on this big endangered list in which many thousands of other languages were also on.

**Kusha Navadar** (2:20)
How did it feel that moment? Can you go back? It sounds like you're in your 20s when you realized that an assumption you had for your whole life up until then was wrong, or at least off the mark a little bit, I guess.

**Sophia Smith Galer** (2:31)
It is incredible really, and a lot of other people, especially since my book came out, have told me how the same thing happened in their family. These languages have historically in Italy been called dialecti, dialects, and that's very much been a position that's been held by the state from an era. It's a legacy from an era of nationalism when Italy was once not a country. It's quite a young country actually, and when it was unified in the 1860s, one of the missions of the state makers of those times was, we need everyone speaking the same language. Unfortunately, the process of that happening meant the positioning of standard Italian as this very prestigious language that everyone should go to school and learn how to write, learn how to speak in it. And then all of these regional languages which are across the peninsula of Italy were relegated as less important, often described as provincial.
And even though in the 19th and 20th centuries, we had this incredible diglossia, that's this linguistic term for when people speak two languages rather than one day to day. There was this incredible diglossia in Italy with people like my nonna who, yes, they did know how to speak standard Italian with any Italian that they met, but at home with their family in their hometown, you would speak the regional language. In my family's case, that was a Piacenza variety of Emilia, and Emilia, it might be helpful to consider it as another evolution of Latin that grew up in the country. Standard Italian itself is one evolution of Latin and there were many others alongside it, but only one of them was given this very prestigious position.

**Kusha Navadar** (4:28)
Yeah. That term that you used, diglossia, I think is such an important reflection as compared to bilingual. You're talking, you're speaking these regularly every day, both of them. And for a lot of us in the United States, that just might not be something we're used to. For many of us, it is, but it is something that I think is indicative of a time when folks were really trying to nationalize a certain language that might not be the one that they spoke at home. And listeners, I'm sure a lot of you have experiences like this. Do you speak an endangered language? How do the languages you speak impact how you look at the world? I'd be especially interested to hear somebody who can talk about that in their experience. Or maybe, are you trying to reconnect with a language from your culture or ancestry? How's it going? Call or text us at 212-433-WNYC.