What really happens when a language dies…
Sophia Smith Galer first understood language loss as a sound coming from upstairs.
Her 93-year-old nonna was in mattress in north London, talking al dialët, the household’s regional language from northern Italy, with Galer’s mom. Galer might perceive a lot of it, but she couldn’t reply 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.”
Sophia Smith Galer’s new ebook begins with her grandmother dying, taking with her her regional northern Italian language.
The scene begins Galer’s new ebook, “How to eliminate a Language” (Crown), which makes use of her household’s personal grief as a leaping off level for a global investigation of what happens when languages disappear, and why their disappearance takes entire worlds of reminiscence, identification, and information with them.
The tome travels from Italian diaspora properties in London to camel herders in Oman; Ukrainian audio system dwelling through struggle; Ladino audio system in Thessaloniki, Greece; Karuk language revival in California and other communities making an attempt to keep their languages from disappearing.
Galer is writing about extinction, but she’s cautious of phrasing that makes disappearance sound inevitable. The phrase she retains returning to is “linguicide,” a time period that treats erasure as the outcome of energy, coverage, struggle, disgrace, and neglect.
“Languages don’t become endangered of their own accord,” she said. “Who is endangering them? What is threatening them?”
That query drives the ebook. Galer argues that audio system are too often blamed for letting a language fade after the establishments around them have made it more durable to move on, less useful in public life, or even harmful to declare as their own.
The new ebook makes use of Galer’s household’s personal grief as a leaping off level for a global investigation of what happens when languages disappear De Agostini via Getty Images
One of the ebook’s most hanging encounters takes place in the mountains of southern Oman’s Dhofar area, where Galer meets Arif, a camel herder who speaks Śḥehrɛ̄t, also identified 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 secure because “everyone speaks Jibbali here.” In the isolation of his group, it still sounds secure.
But Arabic is the nation’s official language and the language of college, authorities, public life, and many jobs, pulling youthful audio system toward the language with energy.
“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.”
“Languages don’t become endangered of their own accord,” Galer told The Post. “Who is endangering them? What is threatening them?” Mercedes Fittipaldi – stock.adobe.com
In Ukraine, language turns into political with horrible velocity. Galer writes about Oryna, a girl from Dnipro whose Ukrainian passport listed both variations of her identify. In Ukrainian, she was Oryna. In Russian, she was Arina, the identify she’d used most of her life in a Russian-speaking home. After Russia’s full-scale invasion, she stopped talking Russian and turned 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 pressured to register non-Kurdish names formally because Kurdish names weren’t allowed in international locations like Turkey.
“One of the many cruelties of linguicide is how it forces these kinds of choices on people,” she said.
“We lose far more than a bunch of grammar rules and words when we lose a language,” Galer asserts. Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The ebook’s hope arrives most clearly through Maymi, a Karuk mom in Northern California.
Karuk is an Indigenous language isolate, which means no associated language has been discovered on any linguistic household tree. While pregnant, Maymi, who had not grown up fluent in Karuk, dreamed the phrase “xurish.” She realized it meant “acorn meat,” gave the identify to her son and started learning Karuk. Maymi is now conversationally fluent in the language and makes a level of talking it with her younger household.
“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 ebook’s last pages, Galer comes to phrases with what her grandmother’s passing meant for her and her distinctive dialect.
“A language is the way your parents spoke to you; it is every memory of your childhood,” she writes. It holds names, songs, household tales 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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