Language Extinction

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Hello. I was once talking to a farmer in France about owls. There are parts of the French countryside where you can hear the calls of three different owls, the one we call the Barn Owl Then there's the tawny owl or hoot owl, and then the little owl. The barn owl can make a screech, but rather disconcertingly, it can also make what sounds like heavy breathing. The hoot owl is the one we say goes to it to woo. But what calls does the little owl make?

Well the farmer and I were discussing this and imitating the sounds of the owls in our respective languages, English and French. In the midst of this, the farmer explained to me that the little owl is saying something with one of its calls. What's that? I said, and he switched languages, from French to what some French people call patois and some call occitan.

He said that in Patois the little owl calls out to young women to tell them to get their hair done because they're going to get married in the morning. All this is compressed into one phrase Koifa and he imitated the little owl as he said it. Koifa Koifa Those of you who know Standard French will know that in Standard French you could say coiffelit to mean the same thing, similar, but different.

All over the world you can tell similar stories where people in a locality can say something one way and there's a standard version for another way. Sometimes it's a matter of pronunciation, sometimes of vocabulary, sometimes of grammar, or any combination of these. In this case, coiffe la it's both pronunciation and grammar, because in Patois there's the word la meaning it, but in Standard French it's l' meaning them.

And that's because in standard French the hair on your head is a them, its plural. Just a tiny difference, you might say. but is it a difference between a standard French expression that means everyone's hair everywhere, and a local expression that means something connected to a people, in this place, in this time, linked to the animals and plants and landscape around them. Now, that part of France has seen a big decline in Occiton, Patois. There'll be a time, let's say, in the next

Twenty or thirty years when no one in that place will know the story of Koifa La attached to the little owl. In that sense it will have died out.

And this is happening all over the world, languages dying out faster and faster. My guest today is a journalist, creator and broadcaster who's travelled all over the world studying the fate of our languages, and she's the author of a book How to Kill a Language.

Power, resistance, and the race to save our words. She is Sophia Smith Gaylor, and I'm very pleased to say Sophia joins me now. Welcome to the programme, Sophia. Thank you for having me. Can we begin by talking about your grandmother, your nunna? And her influence on your work. Of course. A a major influence on everything about me.

My nonna came here after the Second World War. She migrated to London. It's where she met The man who actually came from a village on the valley, uh but met him here in London where uh she got married here, had my my mum and my uncle and nonna came from Piacenza. But very rural Piacenza in the mountains. And which part of Italy is that? Uh plenty of our listeners will know Italy quite well. This is right at the end of a long Roman road. in Emilia Romagna

So if you go to the end of that road, you find Piacenza, the city, and then if you venture a little further out beyond the city, you find the mountains, the Apennines of Italy. And my nonna is from a valley in those Apennines. Now tell us about her language. Growing up, when I used to hear Mumma Nonna talk in well, A language, not not English, I assumed they were speaking to each other in Italian.

And it was only really in my twenties as I began to better explore Italian and my heritage that I realised, oh I actually think they speak this other language'cause right now I'm looking at a map of the languages of Italy and I'm discovering there's far more language diversity there than I had ever realized. And they always spoke about some of the words that they said as Eldielus.

which in and of itself is not an Italian word. I uh the the word for dialect in Italian would be il dialetto. So already they were using a different word to describe dialect. And I discovered it it wasn't a dialect at all, or if it was a dialect, it was a dialect of a language that was not Italian.

So let's wind back to your childhood. Let's find you maybe at the tea table or the dinner table or, I don't know, just going out, and your nonna and your mum talk to you. Do they talk to you in Nonna would always speak to me in English unless she was talking about food or unless she was saying terms of endearment, my little paciug that would have been the alot, which just sort of means little little thing. Um that word, is there an Italian standard Italian equivalent?

Piccolo piccolina, like little little one. So say different give me the two side by side so I could Pachugina. Yeah, yeah, Piccolina. And piccola piccolina, yeah. So already quite different but formed with diminutives, you know, in in the same way. when Nonna would speak to my mum about me she Well how would she say it in in the dialect? Yeah, she'd always talk about La Fiola.

That's you, is it? That's me. Uh and in standard Italian that'd be La Filia. So hopefully at this point you're already hearing some sort of quite fronted vowel sound. Up the front of the mouth. I always thought it sounded a bit like sort of a very angry accented sort of French way of speaking almost'cause there's that strong nasality in the sound that uh in my ignorance I I associated with Oh, that sounds a bit more French than it sounds Italian.

Is there a reason for that? Was there a French influence in that part of Italy? Well, when you look into the language that Nonna spoke, which would have absolutely been a variety of Emilian or Emiliano, Linguists now understand that These languages to be gallow italics. Gallo Romance languages. So actually you were just talking about Occitan.

the language that my nonna spoke would not have been too um too far away from occitan if you looked at a language family tree and they are far closer to each other as examples Occitan and Emilien than Emilien and Italian.

So I I see you sailing through a gate armed with these languages in order to find out about the languages of the world. So tell me, how many languages are there in the world right now? Do you know that fact at your fingertips? There are over seven thousand. Yes. Alive. Seven thousand living languages. And we've got a sense of how fast they're running out.

Linguists estimate that by the end of this century we'll have probably lost about half of that language diversity. Some linguists are far less conservative and they think that it could be anything from fifty to ninety percent of languages are at risk. But they're they're disappearing very, very quickly. And I think it makes a lot of sense when you try and take a step back and look at where we are in history. We're at the tail end of a vast

colonial period. We're at only the very beginning of a digital revolution that is already transforming and has transformed our lives, which in turn followed an industrial revolution. Languages are disappearing faster than ever before because all of these things are happening at the same time. The world, by and large, has globalised, it's only globalising further.

and linguistic diversity in a world where modern nation states have consolidated many of them around policies of one nation, one language. when you look at how there are many economic incentives for communities to learn a prestige language. uh mostly English and Spanish. Yeah. And ch and Mandarin. Exactly. A a macro language of which those are absolutely you can quickly see how a family language, one that carries a lot of Cultural

capital for you, uh, maybe deprioritised, devalued. So add all of these things together with a couple of other reasons that I explore, and you have

very rapid, unprecedented loss of language diversity. Just uh t t take us in your book there, you talk of ten languages. What are the ten languages? So I first use Italian to explore how languages die in diaspora. Then I move on to how language can be killed off in the exercise of nation building. So I look at loss of language diversity in Oman, a quite a young country is an example of that, and I look at the language of Kleret, which is one of the modern South Arabian languages in the South.

I look at what happens to language rights and language in war and I take the example of Ukrainian and what has happened in Russian occupied areas of Ukraine during the current conflict. I look at Ladino, the Judeo Spanish language that came from Iberia. to also look at what happens to languages when they are expelled, when their speakers are expelled from a country, which is absolutely a way of killing a language as well.

I look at colonialism and what happens to a people when they and their lands are exploited as has happened in the United States, and I look at a Californian language, Caruck, which certainly when I wrote the book had twelve living speakers remaining. I look at Quechua, which is a language you will find spoken in Ecuador, it's part of the macro Quechua language, and that tells a story of shame.

in that chapter in particular I actually use an Occitan word because it's from Occitan and the language rights movement that's come from that community. a word vergogna, shame. And I look at how shame is is preventing many people in the Kitchwa community from wanting to teach the language to their children.

In my chapter called Sanctify, it kind of takes a little bit of a different swerve because I look at a language that is so often spoken about as sort of the only language that's ever been brought back from uh the dead. And that would be Hebrew. And I sort of debunk that slightly. That's I would describe that as a kind of half truth representation of the language.

But it was it was effectively fossilized. It was trapped in amber when it was turned from a vernacular language into a language that represented a faith. And I explore how that happens. I then look at what happens when you ignore a language. That's a chapter that really looks a lot at climate change and what linguists

are trying to do now. This is this is very contemporary. It's quite a novel area of research, but the linguists who amidst widespread language endangerment are also worrying about languages being hurt by climate change and people being either forced from areas because of natural disasters.

or the the actual drip by drip movement of a population as as climate migrants have to leave what they know. So for that I go to Ghana and I look at Dagbani, which is a very, very vivacious language. There are lots of speakers if you look at the birth rate you could d argue it's a growing language rather than a disappearing one, but an increased number of climate migrants

from the area in which Dagbani is spoken may mean that certainly in the cities of Ghana where you can't learn Dagbani at school, like we've seen in so many of the other chapters and stories in my book, it yeah, it may disappear from communities.

I of course in a book called How to Kill a Language look at Kurdish for an entire chapter because of the great linguicide that that language has experienced and you know the many massive dialects that are within Kurdish,'cause it's almost inaccurate to really even name it one language, but I look at how it's been criminalised, especially in Turkey, over its history.

And then the final chapter's called Remember and I go back to Italy for that chapter to look at my nonna's language, which is a variety of Emilia uh called Piazente.

Now, predictably people might say, So what? I'll play devil's advocate. I mean what's the point? It doesn't matter. So long as you can communicate. And we've got lots of ways of communicating. Uh we can summarise the way we speak, we can use our hands. I can remember when I was nine or ten and in France and I had spent a whole day with a uh little French boy and we managed to get on very well and I couldn't speak any French and he couldn't speak any English.

Languages are easy to imagine as dictionaries because they're the big books that we associate with language and I think it's a lot more helpful to think of languages as encyclopedias. They carry immense banks of cultural capital and knowledge. They are also a really important marker of identity. It might be hard for any of us speaking or listening who are who would describe ourselves as monolingual English speakers as an example, because because to think that your language could ever disappear

is an intellectual exercise. It's not gonna happen. English is not gonna disappear, absolutely not in our lifetimes at least. But to someone for whom, for example, when I think about my attachment to the language that my mum speaks and my nonna spoke, to think about that being lost brings great sorrow. I think it's a tragedy. And it is in a family, isn't it? I mean, where do we live? We live in family networks. There may not be two up, two down type families, but we live in family networks.

So that's where they actually get lost in the Face to face, isn't it? Absolutely, when linguists look at the vitality of a language, how how well is it spoken? they will look at transmission between parents and children. Absolutely. As we see in many diasporas, it's something that the linguist Joshua Fishman called the three generation model.

you will see in diaspora a language disappears in three generations. So take let's take uh imagine a young person who is migrating to a new country. Imagine my nonna when she was younger. who spoke Italian, her regional language as well, and learned English while she was here. She has my mum and my uncle. My mum becomes very s proficiently bilingual Often acting as a language broker actually between London and my nonna, helping her out.

My mum then has me and I effectively have become completely monolingual towards English, totally losing the ability to speak Italian. With bits thrown in. With bits thrown in, of course, and I have come to understand how my exposure to Italian did form me in a certain way. It didn't make me a productively bilingual person, but is I certainly got a lot of receptive bilingualism from being raised around Italian. But we've got this three generation model that

is repeated all over the world, isn't it? And and there will be many, many grandchildren in my position who understand the family language but do not speak it. And what will happen when I have children if I have children? the only way I would be able to pass on Italian, for example, would be if I Build productivity with it now. Or talk them to Italian lessons and then

instead of saying bread and have your bread now and have your bread and butter you just literally the bread and butter, the stuff of life, that's why I chose that. You would be saying it in Italian. I've seen I've seen families do that. I've seen as a a friend of ours, um he's German. And uh he sp he spoke when the children were growing up he spoke to them in German but he was bilingual himself, he could speak perfect English, but he spoke to them in German so they had the German from his

from his family. He made a point of that. And one of the reasons one of the reasons people do this is so that the children can speak to the grandparents back from where people come. So th th it's a a way of being able to speak to grandparents.

So let's uh uh go into your book a bit more, drill into it. Can I home in on one of the factors you talked about, uh which is shame. Now that really interests me a lot. Um in my family the language of my great grandparents and to a certain extent my grandparents was Yiddish.

And one of the reasons why people stopped speaking Yiddish was because it was regarded as an inferior language, that it wasn't as correct as high German, Hoch Deutsch, there was somehow or other it was a broken language or inferior, and you had somebody like Wagner, um, who poured scorn on it, said you can't express passion through Yiddish

And and at the same time people thought'cause it was the new country, then you must speak the language of the new country, um British English or American English and so on. Um so tell me about more about shame in the example that you give.

people becoming ashamed of their own language. It's very powerful, isn't it, as an idea? What you just described especially in diaspora as well, where if you live in a country where assimilation means monolingual English, really, rather than preserving bilingualism, of course that's going to happen.

Doesn't necessarily follow it would be shame though, does it? I mean the idea that if you say this word or this phrase that somehow or other you're letting yourself down or i it looks bad. What you were just necessarily follow. You were just describing Almost listing or positing languages against each other in terms of what value they offer. So, in the description that you were just giving about how Yiddish could have been conceived of as an inferior language.

That's a value judgment that's been passed on the language. That's not remotely linguistic. It is not linguistic to say one language is more valuable than the other. Makes no sense. You know what I mean? in psychological terms, introjected. They then say, my language is inferior. It came out in the the chapter where I look at shame in in Ecuador, where I looked at what's happened with the Kichua language.

Even amidst government support of indigenous languages in Ecuador, in the eighties, nineties There's research that shows how teachers were still saying things like the the grammar of Quichua is weaker than Spanish, which is untrue. Y you can't say that about one language compared to another. Grammar is grammar. Yeah, grammar is grammar. It might look different, it might behave differently, but grammar is grammar.

And a lot of these attitudes about how quichua you know, you wouldn't want to teach your child quichwa, but you do want them to learn Spanish, English. A lot of these ideas are are passed down and absorbed from the colonial era in which these languages were really, really minoritised.

and really demonstrably hurt by, in this case, the the imperial Spanish state. And if you begin to associate speaking Quechua with your grandparents who lived in poverty, if you begin to associate Qicha as a language of the past, not of the future.

the loss of the language with the military defeat. I mean the whole story of the conquistadores You know, it's a terrifying story, but I mean you're a defeated people, so is there an element I mean this happened in with indigenous languages in North America and in Australia, um where you are the defeated people, so what are you hanging on to

Certainly what came out in my interviews with Kitra speakers was that Culture had been so stratified, so the Quichwa speakers were the underclass, and the Spanish speakers were the overlords. Certainly in Ecuador's case where you're looking at an indigenous movement that is still, I think, only less than fifty years old.

That's compared to about five hundred years of linguicide. It's an awful lot to overcome. In the title of your book you you talk about languages being killed. You are allowed hyperbole in your titles. I d is that okay? Are you are you is that would you hold to that?

term and say that's what's happening to languages? They're being killed? So that chapter list I just walked through was very intentional because each chapter is a different weapon of murder. It's a different way in which a language is being killed.

And that suggests instrumentation though, doesn't it? It does suggest motive. Um you know, murder has motive. Manslaughter it's uh the motive is not necessarily there. Absolutely. I'm leaning towards manslaughter. You you you you want You won't murder, do you? In the eighties and nineties, there was a linguist who coined the term linguicide, Tova Scutnab Kangas. And when she walked through the different ways in which a language could be killed, she looked at both

Overt and covert linguicide. An example of overt linguicide would be a law banning a language. Someone being thrown into jail because they've spoken a particular language. Where's that happened? That has absolutely happened uh in with Kurdish. It's especially happened in Turkey. For eighty five years uh letters like Q and X were banned in official documents in Turkey because they don't appear in Turkish but they do appear in Kurdish.

So you have rules like that, you have teachers, um language activists being thrown into prison. That's a pretty obvious story there of of linguicide and overt language killing. Covert language killing can often just look like neglect. Doing nothing to support a language for Tovskatnum Kangas was equivalent to letting it die. And I I say in the book that it Um you can perhaps look at it as manslaughter rather than murder, but obviously it does have the same result.

And that's happened with Welsh, Gaelic and Irish in the nineteenth century. the different versions, Cornish, um and the Manx language. I mean it's happened right here I mean, n near to where we're talking. It's it's happened here and I would m massively argue that lingua side has happened here. We have had uh Welsh knot. You know, we've had these

campaigns and policies within schools where children would face you know, they would be hit if they spoke Welsh. Um but we have we ha absolutely have covert language killing here as well. Even if you think about some of the attitudes that we've heard. even only very recently about language diversity in in the UK, communities being vilified if they at home they speak a language other than English, which has certainly been an idea courted by more right wing politicians at the moment.

So, what would you like to happen? You've I'm giving you a magic wand, uh, handing it to Sophia. Uh if we met again in the future, let's say ten, twenty years' time, on the programme, welcome to word of mouth, twenty years time. What would you like to happen? What would you like to talk about in twenty years' time? What would I like to happen? I would love to see more access to better funded mother tongue and and heritage language education here in the UK.

and in countries like the UK, it's often really grassroots efforts and parents who are already pushed for time and money desperately trying to maintain the heritage languages that they or their parents brought to the UK and I think we could be doing a lot more to be giving those families support. on a broader level looking at the world and the rapid language loss that we're in the middle of We will not stop that from happening. So lot of the languages which we know are very heavily endangered.

And certainly if they're spoken in communities where there's no interest in maintaining the language anymore because not not enough support was given when it should have been. There are languages that have disappeared, that are being revitalised. There are languages that still have some native speakers remaining and we're in a race against the clock

to record them, document their language, and make sure it is preserved so that the language may be reclaimed or revived. Ultimately The story of linguicide is that languages are cut before their time. And in some cases communities Might feel sad about that? but actually fairly unbothered. And I would even describe Piacenza and a lot of the attitudes I found around my nonna's language there as one of these cases.

But in in other places there are communities really, really desperate to cling on to this language that they can see is fast disappearing. So I would like to see more support for those efforts to make sure that these languages stay with us because that represents the wishes of the language's last remaining custodians. Hm. And when I think of language loss in my family, uh I think of how uh Yiddish well, it virtually disappeared in just three three generations.

And um word of mouth is partnered with the Open University and their linguists interviewed me about my own languages. And listeners, if you'd like to hear that, um go to the BBC Radio for Word of Mouth page and follow the links to the Open University. D, skulle köpa några nya palvställd i lagret. Det kanske blir lite mer grejer. De hade ju allt.

Man hade skriibord, och kontorstolar och så hade de en skitsnyggontain och en massa bra var. Vi har inredning för hela arbetsplatsen. Välkommen till AIPROK. Det finns bara en plats där det här känns rimligt. Nu alla filmer från 99 kronor på filmstaden.

So, Sophia Smith Gaylor, I'd like to say thanks very much for coming on the programme. Now is there a way of saying goodbye, farewell, um that you've come across in your travels that you were particularly struck by? I want to leave you with a thought which came up during my time in Oman when I was interviewing speakers and learners of Claret. I had a learner tell me that there was no word for goodbye.

There was no word for goodbye to learn. Arabic does have a word, goodbye, Matsalama, which is sort of with peace, if I were to directly translate it. And I remember her talking about or theorising perhaps why there was no expression for goodbye in this language. And she believed there was no word for goodbye because there's no reason for us

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