The Race to Save the World’s Dying Languages | S5, E47

Every two weeks, on average, a language falls silent—by the end of this century, roughly half of the world’s 7,000 languages could be gone. On this episode of Unpacked, host Aislyn Greene hands the mic to Lucy Kehoe, who sits down with Sophia Smith Galer, author of How to Kill a Language. Reporting from California, Oman, Italy, and beyond—including her own family’s disappearing Emilian—Sophia makes the case for why a place’s endangered language deserves your attention as much as its food or art.

Topics discussed in this episode

• By 2100, up to half of the world’s ~7,000 languages could disappear, and the rate of loss is expected to triple over the next 40 years.
• A language carries the past, present, and future of a people connected to a place. Losing one can mean losing knowledge, from Oman’s Jibbali (with distinct words for animal versus human shelter) to a California tribe down to 12 adult speakers.
• For travelers, protecting a language means going beyond a few phrases: approaching it with respect, and asking who profits from “language tourism” and whether speaker communities are actually involved.
• You can encounter language on the road at places like Planet Word in Washington, D.C., the Armenian Alphabet Monument outside Yerevan, and Oman’s frankincense heritage sites.

Frequently asked questions

Why are the world’s languages disappearing?

Languages die through a mix of forces: the legacy of colonialism, globalization, mass migration, war, and everyday shifts toward national and global lingua francas. Researchers estimate up to half of the world’s roughly 7,000 languages could vanish by 2100, with the pace of loss tripling over the next 40 years.

What can travelers do to help protect an endangered language?

Go beyond memorizing a few phrases. Approach the language with respect and genuine curiosity rather than treating it as quaint, and when you book a language-related tour or experience, ask who receives the money and whether the speaker community is actually involved. As Sophia Smith Galer notes, what happens to a language is ultimately the speaker community’s choice, not a traveler’s.

Where can you experience languages and linguistic heritage while traveling?

Options mentioned in the episode include Planet Word, the interactive language museum in Washington, D.C.; the Armenian Alphabet Monument outside Yerevan; a Ukrainian language tour in Kyiv; and Oman’s frankincense heritage sites in the Dhofar region.

What is linguicide?

Linguicide is the death of a language, whether through active suppression (as with government repression of a language) or through neglect. Sophia Smith Galer’s book How to Kill a Language investigates how it happens and what is lost when it does.

What is How to Kill a Language about?

It is journalist Sophia Smith Galer’s investigation into endangered languages around the world, reported across California, Oman, Ghana, Ecuador, Italy, and Greece, and threaded through the story of her own grandmother’s dying Emilian dialect.

People, places, and resources in this episode

• Sophia Smith Galer — journalist and author
• How to Kill a Language — buy on Bookshop
• Lucy Kehoe — travel and food journalist
• Planet Word — language museum, Washington, D.C.
• Armenian Alphabet Monument, near Yerevan
• Frankincense heritage sites, Dhofar, Oman

Full transcript

A grandmother’s vanishing tongue (00:00)

Aislyn Greene, host: Here’s a shocking stat, or at least it was shocking to me. By the end of this century, half of the world’s 7,000 languages could be gone. I’m Aislyn Greene, and this is Unpacked by Afar. Today I’m handing the mic to the UK-based freelance writer Lucy Kehoe, who’s going to tell us why there are so many languages at risk.

She sat down with journalist Sophia Smith Galer, author of a new book called How to Kill a Language. This topic is personal for Sophia: her grandmother spoke one of Italy’s indigenous languages, one that is dying out. So Sophia traveled around the world to track down other endangered languages, from the mountains of Oman to the hills of California. Today, she shares why they matter to all of us, and what travelers can actually do — beyond learning a few phrases — to keep those languages alive. Here’s Lucy and Sophia.

Lucy Kehoe, interviewer: I really loved your book. I wanted to start by chatting about your nonna, who starts the book for you. She spoke English, she spoke Italian, and she spoke a distinctive language your family called — and I apologize if I get this wrong — El Dialett. During your research you discovered it’s from northern Italy, one of a number of Italy’s indigenous languages known to exist but almost completely died out. How did your family experience lead you into writing this book?

Sophia Smith Galer: As my nonna was getting increasingly frail, entering her early 90s, I realized I wasn’t just facing the reality of losing a grandmother, but of losing the soundscape I’d been raised around my entire life — how my mum and nonna would always speak to each other in this incredible code-switching portfolio of languages that, in my ignorance, I just thought was English and Italian. They talked about speaking in dialett. I’d always interpreted that as a dialect of Italian, which is how they themselves interpreted it. It was only when I tried to properly learn Italian in my late 20s that I realized: what they speak really isn’t Italian. So part of what I do in the book is try to name it and figure out what it is, because there was such a paucity of information available to me that I had to go to Italy and educate myself. And I brought those learnings back to my mum, and I was able to communicate some things to Nonna as well.

Lucy: Having found this endangered language that was part of your family history, you set off to find other stories around the world about languages at risk. I was amazed to learn that by the end of this century half of the world’s 7,000 languages will be gone, and in the next 40 years language loss is going to triple. We often think of language as a practical tool — something to order food or ask for directions. But what I took from your book is that there’s something deeper going on. What do these languages represent, and as travelers, why should we care?

Sophia: A language speaks to the past, present, and future of a people who belong to a place. After all the work I’ve done, all the speakers from communities around the world I’ve been lucky enough to interview, that’s the simplest way I can boil it down. And what my book looks into is how — whether from the legacy of colonialism, globalization, mass migration, or war — languages are actually quite desperately fragile. People always ask me: why should we care? I can spend ages qualifying it, and I do in the book. But I also sometimes want to respond: can you explain to me why we shouldn’t care? Can you explain why this cultural heritage is not worth remembering?

Why endangered speech matters (03:30)

Lucy: One of my favorite chapters is about how languages are so involved in a landscape — how a language mirrors the place it develops in. You’re in Oman, and Jibbali, from the mountains of Oman, has different words for shelter depending on whether it’s for animals or humans, and different verbs for “to go” depending on what point in the day you leave. These languages felt interwoven into their landscapes. Did you find other places where the relationship between language and landscape was that close?

Sophia: The things we give words to in any language are concepts or ideas that take enough cultural priority that we need a way to describe them. That’s why new words are created and why words fall out of use. One example: today I was researching the etymology of the word “leek,” because that’s my life. “Leek” carries a Germanic etymology, but other languages in Europe take theirs from the Latin porrus — in Italian, the leek is il porro. Once upon a time in English we had “porree,” a leek-y kind of soup. If you stop eating the soup, the word disappears — but it doesn’t mean the word never existed. It comes from a time when people ate more leek soup. So in the book there are various examples where different languages, because of the cultures they come from, express things in a single word that might take me an entire sentence in English.

They’re often described, especially in mainstream media, as “untranslatable” words — and a lot of linguists disagree with that, because of course I can translate the meaning. The point is it takes several more words to explain a concept that speakers of that language just get, because it’s a cultural idea that carries value for them. With the Omani example — the language of Dhofar in the south, which has two names, Jibbali or Khehret, both meaning roughly “of the mountain” — those words are all connected to a people whose primary livelihood was rearing livestock. What happens when that language disappears? If those ideas aren’t fairly translated or valued the way they were, perhaps some of them disappear too.

Words shaped by place (06:00)

Lucy: When you were in Oman, you visited a frankincense heritage experience. I realized that tours can be a way for travelers to get a sense of an endangered language — there was the Ukrainian language tour in Kyiv, and this frankincense tour. Do you think people should make an effort to find endangered languages, and how can they meaningfully engage with a place that has a language at risk?

Sophia: I adore language, so whenever I’m in a new place I try to find some language-related thing to visit. I was in D.C. recently and found out they have Planet Word, a museum dedicated to language — I was very excited. I’ve been to Yerevan in Armenia and driven out into the countryside to see a huge monument dedicated to the Armenian alphabet, with massive letters you can visit. Surprisingly, there are very few alphabet museums in the world.

On the link between tourism and endangered languages: as someone who researches linguicide, I’d want to know who’s getting the money at the end of it, how the funds are being used, and how involved the speaker communities themselves are. There are so many tourists who visit places and don’t take much interest in the language, endangered or not. How many people genuinely invest in language lessons before going away?

Tourism done respectfully (10:00)

Lucy: Realistically, beyond the odd “please” and “thank you,” I don’t think engaging with language is a key part of travel at the moment. And maybe it should be — maybe we should think about travel through language the way we think about culture, art, and architecture.

Sophia: For a casual tourist wanting to engage with an endangered language where they’re visiting — I wouldn’t recommend exoticizing or fetishizing it. What I’d hope for is respect and dignity around its use in the place you’re going, and a thoughtful, respectful curiosity, rather than remarking on it as something quaint or quirky. But it’s always going to be down to the people who live there and what they think. My judgment is actually quite irrelevant.

Lucy: Something interesting in the book is the mixed feelings of speakers of endangered languages — some are proud and pushing to help them thrive, but a lot of people don’t feel that way. Can you say more about that?

Sophia: I encountered three viewpoints. One — the rarest — was “My language isn’t endangered, what are you talking about?” Another was “My language is under threat, and I’m desperately trying to do something about it.” And the third was “My language is under threat, and I don’t think anything can be done” — a kind of resignation. My job as a journalist is to document that, not to say what any language should get. In the final chapter I went to Italy for the dialect my nonna spoke, most authoritatively a rural variety of Emilian from the region of Piacenza. I met people there who cared deeply about the language but are ultimately resigned to its loss. I’m also resigned to its loss in my family and my life. That doesn’t mean I can’t be interested in it, learn about it, and apply value to it.

California’s last speakers (16:00)

Lucy: California is the most linguistically diverse state in the U.S. — once home to 20 known language families and between 80 and 90 languages. You spoke with members of a tribe whose language has just 12 adult speakers now. What gets lost when a language dies in a place like that?

Sophia: In my work I’m informed by two things that can contradict each other. There’s the granddaughter of someone who brought multilingual diversity to London, including a language now critically endangered. And there’s the journalist who has had to report impartially, keeping my own opinion out of it. When you write narrative nonfiction you do have to reintroduce yourself. I try to strike a delicate balance — giving the reader the lay of the land so they can form their own opinion, and then coming in with mine. In all the chapters, it was always about what it means to the custodians of a cultural heritage to lose their language, less about what outsiders could benefit. Linguistics has a complicated, uncomfortable history of valuing languages by what they offer the world without caring about what they offer their speakers.

Lucy: What do they offer the speakers?

Sophia: Languages offer knowledge bases, toolkits. They’re a people’s cultural inheritance.

Reporting a vanishing world, and where to find hope (19:00)

Lucy: You’re multilingual, but you don’t speak all these languages. What were the practical realities of reporting from so many linguistic worlds?

Sophia: Every project begins with a nerd-out phase: reading as much as I can to get the lay of the land — which comes from being a journalist, where sometimes you have to become an expert in a day. With this book I could do searches not only in English but in Spanish, Italian, and Arabic, which proved vital for finding interviewees. Those languages helped with certain chapters but not all. In Oman there were two people I interviewed whose common language with me was Arabic, so I did a two-week Arabic refresher beforehand because I was nervous. In Ecuador I interviewed everyone in Spanish — I’m not a Kichwa speaker. For a chapter on Dagaare I couldn’t interview in Dagaare, but a language activist I interviewed acted as an interpreter. And with Hebrew, which I’ve never formally studied, my Arabic helped, because Hebrew is a Semitic language like Arabic.

Lucy: Were there places you wanted to include but couldn’t?

Sophia: I still had to travel and meet people for all the chapters. For three of them I didn’t go to the place of origin for security reasons — I didn’t go to Kurdistan, Ukraine, or Israel during the writing. I had no travel budget for this book, so it’s incredible I got to California, Ecuador, Oman, Ghana, Italy, and Greece — I did it by hustling and using my advance. I really wanted to meet as many speakers as I could in person, to capture a sense of place along with the language, because a language isn’t only about a people — it’s a people and their connection to a particular place.

Lucy: Any language you now really want to learn?

Sophia: Ladino. An easy way to think about it: Ladino is the language of Sephardic Jews the way Yiddish is often associated with Ashkenazi Jews. It’s a glorious magpie language — the language of a diaspora that spread across the Mediterranean and picked up words as it went. It has hosted incredible music, and I’d enjoy and perform it better if I knew more.

Lucy: The statistics can feel overwhelming. Do you feel optimistic about the future of these languages?

Sophia: Different communities ask for different things. Some are fighting for recognition or resources; in other places the fight is quieter or nonexistent. Ultimately it’s up to the speaker communities what happens to their language — and it should be their choice. For too many communities, the loss came through a change they didn’t author. People respond to that in different ways, just like any loss. As long as people can be at peace with what happens, that’s what I can speak to from my position as a granddaughter. I know that in my bloodline I’ll be the last person to have heard conversations in Emilian that way. But I can use my story to shed light on language loss as a wider phenomenon, and it’s up to people to respond however feels right for them.

Aislyn: That was Lucy Kehoe in conversation with Sophia Smith Galer, author of How to Kill a Language. You can find links to both of their work in our show notes.