Sophia Smith Galer first understood language loss as a sound coming from upstairs.
Her 93-year-old nonna was in bed in north London, speaking al dialët, the family’s regional language from northern Italy, with Galer’s mother. Galer could understand much of it, but she couldn’t answer in it.
“I remember going home afterwards and feeling real sorrow, almost a kind of pre-grief for what I understood I was beginning to lose,” Galer told The Post. “My Nonna was a huge influence on my life, and the thought of losing her and everything associated with her became undeniable that day.”
The scene begins Galer’s new book, “How to Kill a Language” (Crown), which uses her family’s private grief as a jumping off point for a global investigation of what happens when languages disappear, and why their disappearance takes whole worlds of memory, identity, and knowledge with them.
The tome travels from Italian diaspora homes in London to camel herders in Oman; Ukrainian speakers living through war; Ladino speakers in Thessaloniki, Greece; Karuk language revival in California and other communities trying to keep their languages from disappearing.
Galer is writing about extinction, but she’s wary of phrasing that makes disappearance sound inevitable. The word she keeps returning to is “linguicide,” a term that treats erasure as the result of power, policy, war, shame, and neglect.
“Languages don’t become endangered of their own accord,” she said. “Who is endangering them? What is threatening them?”
That question drives the book. Galer argues that speakers are too often blamed for letting a language fade after the institutions around them have made it harder to pass on, less useful in public life, or even dangerous to claim as their own.
One of the book’s most striking encounters takes place in the mountains of southern Oman’s Dhofar region, where Galer meets Arif, a camel herder who speaks Śḥehrɛ̄t, also known as Jibbali.
The language and Arabic are both Semitic, but Galer writes that they’re not mutually intelligible. Arif reassures her that the language is safe because “everyone speaks Jibbali here.” In the isolation of his community, it still sounds secure.
But Arabic is the country’s official language and the language of school, government, public life, and many jobs, pulling younger speakers toward the language with power.
“The more remote someone lives, the more likely it is that their local language may be incubated, isolated within a self-sustaining community, and protected from competing linguistic hierarchies,” she says. “Towards the end of my research, I realized that I often found myself either in a really remote, rural location or deep in an archive. They’re the two last spaces that a language may be heard, or seen, before it disappears from contemporary life.”
In Ukraine, language becomes political with terrible speed. Galer writes about Oryna, a woman from Dnipro whose Ukrainian passport listed both versions of her name. In Ukrainian, she was Oryna. In Russian, she was Arina, the name she’d used most of her life in a Russian-speaking home. After Russia’s full-scale invasion, she stopped speaking Russian and became Oryna.
“I think for most people, certainly for me, the idea of changing your name is incomprehensible,” Galer said. “It’s such an intimate part of ourselves . . . Oryna’s choice reflects on how visceral feelings are for many Ukrainians about their relationship to the Russian language and what it stands for.”
In the Kurdish chapter, Galer writes about Kurds who’ve been forced to register non-Kurdish names officially because Kurdish names weren’t allowed in countries like Turkey.
“One of the many cruelties of linguicide is how it forces these kinds of choices on people,” she said.
The book’s hope arrives most clearly through Maymi, a Karuk mother in Northern California.
Karuk is an Indigenous language isolate, meaning no related language has been found on any linguistic family tree. While pregnant, Maymi, who had not grown up fluent in Karuk, dreamed the word “xurish.” She learned it meant “acorn meat,” gave the name to her son and began studying Karuk. Maymi is now conversationally fluent in the language and makes a point of speaking it with her young family.
“Raw, grassroots willpower is what protects languages alongside institutional infrastructure,” Galer said. “The latter can be built up with constitutional recognition and funding; the former is organic, community-driven and is done by people, through people . . . That’s why I always say it’s ultimately down to speakers and the community themselves.”
In the book’s final pages, Galer comes to terms with what her grandmother’s passing meant for her and her unique dialect.
“A language is the way your parents spoke to you; it is every memory of your childhood,” she writes. It holds names, songs, family stories and the small intimacies that make people legible to one another. “We lose far more than a bunch of grammar rules and words when we lose a language.”
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