How to Kill a Language

‘An extremely moving, passionate plea. 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, colonise’ CAL FLYN, author of Islands of Abandonment

‘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

‘Sophia Smith Galer is one of the UK’s most impressive young journalists’ GREG JENNER

‘This is the best book on language endangerment I have ever read. A love letter to languages … Its 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 Language Death

‘Utterly fascinating, very topical and wide-ranging’ BIDISHA

‘Smith Galer reveals that language is never neutral, it is a site of power. Immersive, personal and poetically precise, she traces the dialects and sub-dialects pushed to the margins, and shows how their erasure mirrors wider patterns of exclusion. This is an urgent book about who gets to shape culture, and who refuses to disappear’ MEGHA MOHAN, author of Herlands

Sophia is a reporter, writer and documentary maker with the BBC World Service, specialising in religion and digital culture. She is the first BBC journalist to be on TikTok and has accrued over 200,000 followers across social media. She was named as a ‘Voice of Change’ in the TikTok 100 best of 2020 and sits as an inaugural member of the TikTok Creator Council. She was also selected as a One to Watch by the Edinburgh Television Festival in 2020 and has a Webby in Social Media for Arts and Culture. This will be her first book.