Languages are disappearing, and the problem is political
Language loss is often a reluctant choice made to escape violence, not a willing choice made to gain benefits.
Sophia Smith Galler's book "How to Kill a Language" examines the various methods used to coerce individuals into adopting dominant languages, often at the expense of their own. These methods encompass violence, dispossession, forced relocation, criminalization, and public humiliation, as well as more subtle techniques such as economic pressure and political indifference.
Galler visits communities in Oman, Greece, Ecuador, the United States, and Ghana, and speaks with experts like Ukraine's language commissioner and Kurdish academic Farangis Ghaderi. She also shares her family's experience of assimilation as migrants in the UK, setting her book apart from previous works on endangered languages.
While language loss research has a history dating back to the 1950s, earlier books often downplayed the political aspect of the issue, presenting it as a biological phenomenon. However, recent works like "Speak Not" (2021) and "Language City" (2024) have started to emphasize the political dimension of language loss, arguing that it is a problem requiring political solutions.
Responses to Galler's book, such as philosopher Nikhil Krishnan's piece in The New Yorker titled "Sometimes, It's O.K. to Let a Language Die," recycle old arguments that ignore extensive research. These critics argue that language loss is due to individual choice rather than collective coercion, and that speakers often choose to adopt dominant languages to improve their economic situation. They also claim that language loss is a natural process, inevitable and beyond human intervention.
However, researchers have known since the 1950s that language loss involves a significant degree of coercion and violence, with extreme examples including the hunting and massacring of Indigenous people, forced removals, and slavery. Eighty years of research confirms that violence and terror are prevalent methods of driving language loss.
Galler's book highlights how people often have no choice but to abandon their native languages due to extreme circumstances, making language loss an avoidable problem rather than an inevitable one.
Written by urgent.news from The Conversation AU's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
