How to Kill a Language

Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words

De: Sophia Smith Galer

An urgent, globe-spanning exploration of languages at risk, from Kichwa to Ukrainian, that asks: What do we lose—culturally, politically, and personally—when a language is silenced?

Languages can be killed in many ways: war, the climate crisis, nationalism, and even quiet choices made at the dinner table. Around the world, an unprecedented shift is drawing speakers toward national and global lingua francas. For some, that means losing the language of parents or grandparents; for many, it is a permanent farewell to systems that carry knowledge, culture, and belonging. With half of our 7,000 languages due to disappear this century, linguicide is one of the most pressing cultural emergencies of our age.

In How to Kill a Language, journalist Sophia Smith Galer travels across continents and generations to chart this phenomenon. In Ecuador, she sees firsthand how shame deters parents from passing Kichwa onto their children. In Oman, she learns about languages with roots older than Arabic but never officially recognized. And in Italy, she searches for her Nonna’s dialët, which is vanishing from diaspora communities and Italy itself. But languages can also be reclaimed: We meet the Karuk tribe of California, pioneering a grassroots language immersion program, and the storytellers challenging the criminalization of Kurdish. And in her discussion of Hebrew, Smith Galer reckons with the unintended consequences of raising a language seemingly from the grave.

Part investigation, part travelogue from a disappearing world, How to Kill a Language exposes the true costs of this mass extinction event. Brought to life by vivid storytelling and Smith Galer’s own experience with language loss, it’s a fierce rallying cry for a multilingual future.

Reseñas de la Crítica

“How to Kill a Language paints a vivid, hopeful portrait of how people around the world are staying connected to their linguistic roots against the odds. Sophia Smith Galer deftly balances the human detail with the bigger linguistic picture. Marvelously done.”—Gretchen McCulloch, author of Because Internet

“Sophia Smith Galer shines an intimate light on a pressing issue. How to Kill a Language tours the world with a personal touch, revealing the powerfully human stakes behind language death and revitalization.”—Adam Aleksic, author of Algospeak

“An extremely moving, passionate plea to protect linguistic diversity. A language is more than a dictionary or a system of grammar: it is an archive, a culture, a symbol, a mode of being. Sophia Smith Galer’s fascinating book digs down into what it really means to translate, document, conserve, comprehend, colonize.”—Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment

“How to Kill a Language hits the intersection of language and power as few other books have, with vivid reporting of how ‘linguicide’s broad scythe’ is cutting through communities worldwide. Racing from the Dhofar region of Oman to her family’s ancestral village in northern Italy, not to mention Ghana, Ecuador, and many points in between, Sophia Smith Galer is the rare journalist who listens closely to endangered languages and brings them to life on the page.”—Ross Perlin, author of Language City

“A love letter to languages. These ten stories locate their languages in a context of personal heritage, identity, and culture in a way that is both intellectually rigorous and yet profoundly moving.”—David Crystal, author of How Language Works

“Beautiful, thought-provoking, and compelling.”—Susie Dent, author of Guilty by Definition

“How to Kill a Language both demystifies and sharply contextualizes linguicide by providing not only the reasons why languages die, but also the stories of the speakers and communities whose languages are lost. I’m so glad this book exists: Language preservation and revitalization are causes sorely in need of a champion.”—David Peterson, author of The Art of Language Invention