It is an intriguing book, and I knew after reading the introduction that it was not only an interesting read but I thought it was an important book. I brought it to the attention of one or two people interested in the language and hopefully they have read it too. Your attention is immediately grabbed by the first sentence, "Upstairs a language is dying..."
Language can be looked at in three ways. Reading her thoughts I naturally, maybe inadvertantly, thought of the attitude and/or policies own governments and/or civil servant to our own unique language.
Minority languages may be thought of as one of the following though not exclusively:
1. A nuisance or a problem.
2. A Right
3. A Resource
I thought of our situation in Ireland. Does the Irish government political or administrative, fall into any of these catagories? Certainly we can all point to cases where number one is paramount. Number two is a more recent heading here especially with the inauguration of the office of Coimisinéir Teanga. But where are the signs of our language been treated as a resource by the administration?
Of course the title of the book, "How to kill a language - Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words,"* is what attracted me in the first place. The author lists various ways in which languages die or are killed. She calls it linguacide and the rest of the book list these with real examples from disparate parts of our world. What struck me was how little she referred to our own language struggle or that of our neighbouring countries, Cymru, Alba or Breizh.
The first one she lists is Emigration and is very personal to her own experience. Her Nana an immigrant into England spoke a language she called dielet but that had been replaced by Italian - the state language. On immigration the Italian was replaced by English and though the actual immigrants continued to use Italian among themselves the did not (in a way familair to us in Ireland) pass this knowledge to the next generation. In the author's own case though she could in many cases know what her elders were saying she was unable to speak it. Thus in one generation the knowledge and culture were if not lost certainly severely diluted.
She then proceeds in a further nine chapters to outline the various ways a language dies or is killed. "Letting a language die or not supporting its existance (is) covert language killing with similar results to overt language killing - perhaps a little like comparing manslaughter and murder." She lists various languages and places she has visited as examples of the various pressures on language.
- Build - Oman
- Occupy - Ukraine
- Expel - Greece
- Exploit - California
- Criminalise - Iraq/Turky etc (Kurdish)
- Shame - Peru (Kichwa)
- Sanctify - Israel
- Ignore - Ghana
- Remember - Italy
Some of these we are aware of but many are languages we have perhaps not ever heard of nor do we regard many the languages against which they are struggling particularly aggressive. English we do know because of our history. But languages like Italian, Arabic, Turkish, Greek or Russian? Who knew?
This is a book that I found very stimulating not because it solves anty problems but because it help understand what is happening in the area of language and to a certtain extent it explains things that we can see happenin in the case of our own linguistic experience.
*HOW TO KILL A LANGUAGE: Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words; Sophia Smith Galer;
2026;
HarperCollins GB;
ISBN 978 0 00 872372 9 (Hardback)
ISBN 978 0 00 872373 6 (Paperback)
