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C
welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer mia Sorrenti. Roughly 7,000 languages are spoken around the World today, over half of them are expected to vanish in the next century. So what do we lose when a language dies? Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with journalist Sophia Smith Gaylor. Smith Gaylor joined Maryam Moshery, chief presenter at BBC News, to discuss the global crisis of linguicide live at the Kiln Theatre in London. Smith Gaylor drew on her new book, how to Kill a Language to explore what happens when languages vanish and with them, histories, identities and ways of understanding the world. From Italy to Iran, Ghana to California, she examines both the forces driving linguistic extinction and the communities fighting to keep endangered languages alive. Let's join our host, Mariam Mushri, live at the Kiln Theatre.
- [03:13]
D
Hello, everyone. A very warm welcome to the event this evening. My name is Marianne Moshiri. I'm so happy and honored to be here tonight to introduce this event with Sophia Smith Gaylor. Now, before I introduce her, I just want to let you know that Sofia and I know each other quite well. We used to work at the BBC together, didn't we? And more recently I appeared on Sofia's fantastic podcast and we were also coming contestants on University Challenge, weren't we?
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E
But we never battled each other, thank
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D
God, because you beat everyone because you're super clever and super bright and my team were, I think, lacking in certain areas. Sophia is an award winning journalist, she is an author, she's a podcaster. She began her career reporting across the BBC, which is how I know her because I worked there too, and the World Service in Radio 4, in BBC World News as well. And she built a Webby winning BBC social media channel, or a few of them, before joining Vice News up until February 2024. So she has had an amazing career so far and since then she's now started producing content on a range of topics, not just linguicide, but also on disinformation. She also produced things on health, technology and all other types of subjects as well. Generational communication, gender equality, amongst other things. In 2024, you were named the winner of the Georgina Henry Award for the Women in Journalism Awards for Digital Innovation. And we are here to talk about your book, which is on the table, how to Kill a Language. So thank you so much for joining me, Sophia. It's a pleasure to be here.
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E
Thank you.
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D
When they asked me to do this, I was like, hell, yeah. Sophia is someone who is super intelligent, super bright, but also has this fountain of knowledge and this keen interest in languages. Where does that come from?
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E
My mum comes. Whose birthday? Where are you where are you? So let's say happy birthday to my mom. Research shows us that children want to be multilingual if they're exposed to it. And I was exposed to it from a very young age by watching. I didn't know my mum was trilingual at the time. I assumed bilingual between English and Italian. So that was the first multilingualism that I was exposed to. And then when I was at school and had the opportunity to study language I really enjoyed. I did French, Spanish and Latin at school. That's what was on offer for me. And I ended up taking Spanish to Unique. And then I did Arabic from scratch at uni. I wanted to do a language that wasn't a Romance language, because all the ones I'd studied already were. And I was obsessed with Al Andalus and sort of the history of Spain. And I thought Arabic seems like a good companion to Spanish. So I studied them and that's where it all began for me.
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D
Tell me a little bit about the family language and how that influenced you. What was spoken at home? What are the three languages your mum spoke? And what's the heritage that has spurred you on?
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C
Yeah.
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E
So this. The writing of this book began in my. Or the thinking behind what became the book began in my late 20s when I was just thinking more and more about what I felt like was the language that had got away. How could I be such a good speaker of Spanish and Arabic, but I don't speak the language that, in theory, I felt like I have this birthright to Italian and I don't speak it. And I felt very embarrassed for not speaking it. And upon further scrutiny, as I tried to revive or try to learn Italian, I really didn't think I could speak any. When I understood it all. There was something uneven about my Italian language knowledge that I think anyone here who may be a child or grandchild of immigrants, you might have experienced something similar. So I went on all these rabbit holes about receptive bilingualism and how it is possible for someone to be very good at understanding a language without speaking it. Suddenly I had a label that seemed to describe me. I started. I've done everything from spending more time watching Italian TV to I play video games exclusively in Italian. I've been doing all of these things to try and immerse myself.
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D
I found dating Italian guys very helpful as well.
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E
Oh, yeah.
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D
That's how I learned my Italian.
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E
Good idea. Good idea. And I. It was in the scrutiny and learning more about Italian that I. I still had my nonna with me at this point. And it became very obvious that what Nonna and Mum were speaking to each other wasn't Italian. And then I realized upon looking on a map of Italy's language diversity, it's amazing. The one thing everyone should do after this is if you've never seen a map of Italy's languages, Google it. I saw that. Oh, the language here is called Emilian. There's Romagnol nearby, in sort of each of the Italian regions is its own distinctive language almost. And it's on the endangered languages map. So it is not long of this world. And that's what began all of this. And in Italy, people of my Nonna's generation, certainly, and decreasingly so, especially in the north, were diglossic. So Diglossia is where you have a culture where habitually people speak two languages. The same thing happens in the Arab world. Diglossia, people will be able to speak modern Standard Arabic or Fusha, alongside the regional vernacular.
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D
You talk about languages dying, linguicide. It sounds kind of like a crime. Do you think it's a crime?
- [09:19]
E
I do think it's a crime, yeah. I think that as a term, it was coined fairly late, so it was coined by a linguist in the 1980s. If you try and write it, as I did many times for the book on a word processor, a red squiggly line appears under it as if I've made an error. The word is that young and the word is that little known. It's only really known in linguistics, which is why I sort of hope that my storytelling and journalism can drag it into the mainstream. But for so long, languages and the endangerment of languages has been looked at through the lens of focusing on the language itself and what endangerment status shall we give it? And when linguists try and decide quite how threatened or endangered the languages, there are all these criteria that they try and diagnose. The most fundamental one is do parents pass it to their children the minute you lose? Generational transmission is the biggest warning sign for a language. And there is actually a lot of debate in the field of linguistics. It used to be quite comfortably described as language deaf. That wouldn't have been a phrase people disagreed with the better known. This has become as a phenomenon. A lot of people actually reject the term language death. They will say that it is too brutal, it is too cruel, it is
- [10:48]
D
not very sensitive what to call it that.
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E
Yeah. So some people don't like it because they think it's too nasty for someone who is nurturing such a language. That may be possibly facing this outcome. Is there a better phrasing we could be using? If you look at the scale, though, you use words like moribund, dormant, extinct, like it's a panda or a volcano. And I mean, we'll have all heard languages being described as dead because we'll have all heard Latin being described like that, or ancient Greek like that. Not languages of which people are today tied very closely to ethnically, to a language. It's a fundamental part of their ethnic identity. Linguists have suggested other terms. So some suggest dormant. They think that that's less. It's not only sort of less insensitive, you could argue it's more accurate. We know that languages can be revived. We know that there's revitalization, reclamation and revival of language that happens. In the book I discuss, Hebrew is one of the most famous examples of a language being revived. I sort of semi contest with this theory. It's often said that it's the only language that's been brought back from the dead. And I kind of challenge that reading of it. But we know a language can be revived, so the language can be revived. Can we say it died? Can we say it died? I don't know. I prefer to focus on the agent. What is the agent that's killing the language? Or who here actually holds responsibility in a language disappearing? Because that's the fundamental learning from the book, that languages are disappearing because something is disappearing them. They're not going of their own accord.
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D
Let me put on that thread a little bit. You talked there about the connection between language and culture and the way in
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E
which we live our lives.
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D
How is that connected and why is it important? Because language is more than just communication, isn't it?
- [12:52]
E
Yes. And I think that you're trilingual, you know, as if you listen to our episode of Word, word for word, you can hear all about your. Your Marian's incredible linguistic portfolio. But anyone here who is multilingual, I do not have to persuade anyone here who identifies as that that language is more than communication. It's more than a simple transaction of can I get what I want in this scenario? Because you've understood me and I can understand you. Bish bash bosh. That's never been what language. That's like a one tiny little segment of what language means to us. Languages speak to a place, a people, a history and a future for that people. That's what I believe. I think languages, especially after writing the book and witnessing firsthand how much knowledge and tradition is embedded for people in the language that they speak how they feel, like they lose a grip on that when they lose the language. I make the point that we're accustomed to associating languages with dictionaries or very boring year 7 French textbooks or something. And really languages are encyclopedias. Immense knowledge and history is baked into them. And we need encyclopedias not only to understand the past, but the present and future as well. And that's what a language means to us.
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D
Tell me a little bit about the fact that by the end of the century half the world's 7,000 languages will be gone. What's causing this mass extinction of language, do you think?
- [14:29]
E
We begin by considering how do we know there are 7,000 languages? Someone's had to count them. And linguistics itself is quite a young area of science. We have not. We have 7,000 plus known languages. So there may well be more. There just hasn't been a linguist who has gone and done the fieldwork in a particular place. Because guess what? Linguists need funding, they need money, resourcing. There's not much of that at the moment. So 7,000 plus is what we are aware of. And we're living in a fast globalizing world. We are living when in studies about language loss and disappearance. One of the most common factors associated with it in research that was done, is the building of roads and the increase in educational level. What's that got to do with it?
- [15:20]
D
What's building a road got to do with it?
- [15:22]
E
Because the minute you build roads, you're connecting. You're possibly taking somewhere that may have been a little more isolated and you're connecting them with the world. And they are very immediately meeting the socio economic incentives of a language hierarchy that they might be meeting for the first time in their lives. My nonna was diglossic. My nonna was able to speak Italian and her regional language very well. But what's happened in Italy over time is that the regional languages have simply just not been given much institutional importance. So the minute you start thinking that what's the point of this speaking this language, it's not going to get me a job. And if no one's coming in and saying one, can we say that jobs should include this, that you should be able to speak this language to get a job, as has happened in many countries around the world, to preserve their languages, or if you're saying you're misunderstanding what it means for a language to be useful, even applying that word useful, Would we ever call a culture useful? One culture more useful than the other? We wouldn't. But we feel We've sort of been persuaded culturally to look at language often in that way as languages as more useful or valuable than the other. So the beginnings can often be very intimately linked to globalization. In one of the first chapters I look at the building of a nation. Nationalism is so often associated with one nation, one language. We've seen that pattern repeat around the world. And then I also look at shame. I look at criminalization. Many things unfortunately can kill a language. Languages are actually quite desperately fragile when you think about it.
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F
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E
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D
Let's talk a little bit about the roads. You talked about building roads, but what about the roads that we now see in terms of globalization, Internet access, the fact that English has now risen up to be that language that everyone pretty much has to learn to get ahead globally. What has that done, do you think, to those 7,000 languages?
- [18:31]
E
Not all of the languages, not all of the areas that I went to for the book are facing the most immediate pressure from English as a macro language. Some places are. But take for example in Ecuador. Spanish is. It's not only a current threat, it became a threat 500 years ago when the Spanish came and attempted to colonize and succeeded with Ecuador and across South America. It began then. We didn't have linguists tracking all the languages back then. We can only guesstimate as to how many there possibly were that we don't have with us. Quechua. Quechua being some of the languages that have survived. But now the speaker numbers of Quechua are fast depleting and there's a lot of language activism happening. Try and protect it, including constitutional power from the Ecuadorian government, including bilingual education. Ecuador in the book is one of the examples actually of the most institutional support being given to such languages.
- [19:37]
D
And that's really interesting because there are countries that are complete and utter opposite, aren't there that want to kind of, you know, stamp out many languages. Just an example of that.
- [19:48]
E
Well, some do it in a really overt way and in fact, linguicide as a term was coined. Sorry. The linguist who coined the term linguicide referenced Kurdish really heavily in her body of work. So she was. She argued that Kurdish was probably the language that had suffered some of the most linguicide in the 20th century. And in Turkey especially, there are many places to date where Kurdish has spoken. But in Turkey especially, it has literally faced laws that have stopped. Persuaded people to stop speaking it in public life, because if they did, they'd be thrown in jail or worse. In other places, it's a little bit more covert. So in Oman, there isn't. I can't say that there is a law preventing people from maintaining the local languages. Oman being the only country in the Gulf today that has preserved its indigenous languages, there's no law. But is it recognized in the Omani constitution? There is only one official language in the Omani constitution, and it's Arabic. So it just. It's invisible. Italy's languages, many Italian languages, are like that as well. It's not like there's a law telling people to stop speaking it. It's just not even recognized. And that's where the trickle down, the attitudinal trickle down begins.
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D
Forget about English. Do you think the Internet has helped or hindered these languages from blossoming once more, from being saved?
- [21:26]
E
The chapter in Ghana was really cool because if you look at the northern Ghanaian language of Dabbani, from one hand, where there are well over a million speakers, the population there, their birth rate is growing. You can very easily make an argument that this looks like a vivacious language and it is stable, it doesn't have any kind of endangerment status. But if you speak to all of these digital activists who I visited and spent time with, they are terrified at the lack of digitization of their language. A language that has always been primarily oral, to the point that when they first started trying to create an orthography for Doug Barney, in that chapter, I look at sort of the bonkers bureaucracy of the Ghanaian government and how they decide what qualifies as a language. Basically, you need loads of literature in it, but most of the languages are oral. So all of a sudden it's like, okay, hang on a minute. If languages here are oral, why are you judging them by literary criteria? So there's sort of problem number one there. And when the linguists first started trying to make an orthography out of it, because Dadbani has always been an oral language, the Dagomba ethnic people did use a literary language, but it was Arabic. Because they had had Arabic for some time since the spread of Islam. So there was, there wasn't much to work with. And as a result you of in those scenarios it's happened a lot in Africa, it's happened in South America especially as well. I'm sure it's happened elsewhere. But you'll find an awful lot of Christian missionaries will be part of these early efforts because they come with an agenda. They want to help create a writing system for a language in the hope that they can one day make a Bible and proselytize speaking to these Takbani language activists. They're desperately just trying to create, for example, loads of Wikipedia articles in their language to try and make sure that they have a presence online. There's some really cool AI innovation happening there because they're looking at Google Translate suddenly acquiring all of these languages or claiming to, claiming to offer all of these translation services and they're seeing their own languages go entirely neglected. So you've got loads of young, smart Ghanaians making their own translation tools because they're not going to stick around and wait for big tech that's always ignored them. But they have to generate all of the training data to make it happen. A lot of the training data for their languages, all of their translation tools, they begin by sounding way too biblical because the only training data that they have in some cases is a Bible that's the, you know, that's the most readily available written material. So all these challenges to face and intriguingly, in where the Ghanaian government hasn't really wanted to sort of change how it looks at a language, what a language must be to qualify for us sort of sponsoring it and recognizing it, Wikipedia has actually been really open minded. So in theory, the Dagomba in Northern Ghana have always had Wikipedia. It's just been their drummers. You know, they have these oral storytelling drummers who maintain the history of their people in their head. They memorize these, you know, this immense quantity of text and they perform it. That's always been, that is, that's the cultural encyclopedia. So there have been examples on Wikipedia where you get a sort of speaker community from a particular language and you have all of the elders sit around, one of them will start telling a story and another elder may disagree. That's called fact checking. We'd be very familiar with a live fact check. And they record that conversation and then that conversation becomes the citation on Wikipedia. And that challenges how Western science will have taught any of us in here, anyone in here who's ever edited in Wikipedia. Editing on English Wikipedia is immensely challenging for this reason. You, you constantly need these really dense citations. So Wikipedia has actually changed. It's had a sort of second look at how it can be recording people's languages in order to make sure that they get recorded in the first place in a way that a government is still yet to recognize.
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D
Let's talk about keeping languages alive. Where is the resistance going to come from? You talked there about young and, you know, determined Ghanaians. Is it the young and the determined globally who are going to lead the way, do you think, in saving languages?
- [26:23]
E
So the places that I went to, where there were activists, you know, language activists working, I can't actually necessarily say that they were all young people per se, but it was grassroots. This all begins grassroots and a common theme. I mean, I, I went across four continents for the book. That's where I managed to get myself the most. One of the most common themes was how underfunded, how, how all of these people sort of valiantly trying to keep their languages alive. Many were doing it because it was just really important to them. They were not doing it because they were being paid immense amount of money or anything. Many of them were doing it on an entirely voluntary basis. And they're doing it because they don't, they don't want to see a really important part of their identity and their community's identity get lost forever. And I do think there is an element of sort of, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. So I think in many cases there comes this crisis moment where, oh, my goodness, we really are going to lose something. And then that sparks the grassroots. What about schools? What role do they have to play? Schools have a huge role to play. Of course, what schools teach is normally decided not by schools, but by the education system, decided by their governments. But mother tongue language instruction, this is sort of the, the drum, really, that the UN probably beats the most. It's that every child around the world should go, should get schooling in their, in their mother tongue. And it's still happening around the world that children are learning. They're effectively inheriting a language at home, a local, you know, community language. And they go to school, and they may get schooling only in the country's lingua franca. And linguists, like the linguist Toscatna Kangas, who coined linguicide, they argue that education should be additive. So there's nothing wrong with learning the lingua franca. Of course, you should learn languages that are going to enable opportunities in the Future we can also make sure to keep your mother tongue going. And all too often what happens is education becomes subtractive, so the child is not taught in their mother tongue and they'll learn the other ones. And actually it's really important. It sounds really simple, but it's still worth saying. The first words you start forming in your mouth, those are the ones you should learn how to sort of associate with the squiggles that become writing. It's that basic. And the minute you're teaching a kid to write in a language which isn't what they're speaking at home, there's already a little element of disruption there. It's really interesting. So in the uk we don't have much support, for example, mother tongue or heritage language education. It's quite piecemeal. You might be lucky. You might live in an area where there's support and someone else might live in an area where there's very little support. In countries like Sweden, as long as there are sort of, I think four children in a local area who speak a certain language at home, the local area has to fund language teaching for those children. Mother tongue language teaching. Really cool idea in Sweden is that if you as a child. So imagine your child, you speak a different language at home to Swedish, you get this regional support. You learn it, you do an exam in it. If you get a good mark, it contributes to your general grade.
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D
When you say different language, is that a dialect of Swedish or are you
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E
talking about completely Arabic? Let's just say Arabic.
- [30:10]
D
Okay.
- [30:11]
E
You live in an area where there are five other children, they will teach you Arabic and so they'll make sure that you get support to learn Arabic. You might not be at your school, but you, once a week or whatever, you will get Arabic language contact. If you get a good mark in your Arabic, it contributes towards your general grade. If you get a bad mark, it doesn't contribute towards your general grade. Imagine if language learning at school had been like pe. You're expected to do it because it's good for your physical and mental well being. We're not going to grade you and tell you you're bad at French, you're good at French. We're going to actually relieve that pressure from you and just let you learn it. That's what's proven to be very effective in Sweden for mother tongue.
- [30:54]
D
Could you do that here?
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E
Could you do that here? Could you do that here?
- [31:00]
D
Yeah. You need money, right? It's.
- [31:02]
E
This is a really good point. So in chapter one, I look at immigrant language Loss, which is the phenomenon in which is really common. Joshua Fishman did, the linguist did all this work decades ago where a well documented pattern that the language of the immigrant grandparent will be lost by the grandchild. It's very common pattern. It's the pattern I had in my own family. Really common pattern. There are all these tiny little variabilities that can affect your particular family's chances of preserving a heritage language. One of them being high socioeconomic status, because it doesn't take a genius to work it out. If you can pay for your kid to get these lessons after school, of course they're more likely to be able to preserve it. If you yourself are more able to spend loads of time at home speaking to the child because you're not working a double shift trying to earn enough to feed your kid, of course you're going to be more able to expose your child to whatever lessons you want to give your child, linguistic or otherwise. Even your birth order. If you're the oldest child, you are more likely to pick up the family language if you are middle or younger, because you've effectively got a kind of mini other grown up in the family, even if they're only two years older than you, because they've been going, you know, in our context here, if they've been going to an English language instruction school, there'll be dominant English language and they'll be influencing. They'll probably speak to their siblings in the dominant language as opposed to the family. You need a lot of that language
- [32:42]
D
to be able to speak it.
- [32:43]
E
I think if you immense exposure, if
- [32:46]
D
you're spoken to in that language, just from anecdotal experience, I find that you don't, then you're able to maybe understand it and answer back, but you can't
- [32:54]
E
actually speak it fluently.
- [32:56]
D
You need kind of both parents speaking
- [32:58]
E
to each other and speaking to you. If your parents divorce, if your parents don't stay together, that can affect whether the language is. When you sort of think about it, it all starts to make sense like this massive puzzle piece. But I'm yet to become a parent, but I. I understood from everyone I interviewed that parents weren't told these things when they were raising their children. And a lot of basically heritage language banks in families just went totally ignored. And in the book, I interview an amazing linguist who did a really cool book that if you like mine, hers should be the next one that you read. You'll find out about it in chapter one. She was told by a health visitor who came to her with her young child. She was speaking to him in Polish because she wants him to maintain Polish language. And the health visitor said you shouldn't be speaking to him in Polish. You're going to confuse him. Yeah, and that is, that was well intentioned advice from someone who was totally wrong. That's baseless. That's in terms of cognitive and behavioral sciences, it's baseless. But a lot of people have been told it, they feel like it's true and so they'll pass it on. But it's wrong.
- [34:09]
C
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership. If you'd like to join us at future live events, you can find our full program and buy tickets over@intelligencesquared.com forward/attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.