Every 2 Weeks a Language Dies: Whether By Assimilation or Targeted Extinction
When the 7.8 magnitude earthquake tore through southeastern Turkey in 2023, the government posted that it would provide translation support in seven languages: Turkish, Arabic, Persian, English, Russian, German, and Pashto. Kurdish, spoken by fifteen million people in the affected region, was not on the list. Elderly Kurdish speakers cried out for help in their mother tongue and could not be understood. Women were afraid to speak Kurdish for fear of not being rescued. Two days later, the government shut down Twitter entirely. A Kurdish educator named Zara Mohammadi had already been jailed for ten years in Iran for the crime of teaching Kurdish to village children for free. Turkey had banned the letters q, w, and x for eighty-five years because they appeared in the Kurdish alphabet and not in Turkish.
Today's guest is Sophia Smith Galer, author of *How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words*. We discuss how up to half of the world's 7,000 languages will disappear within the next century, and why this isn't natural attrition but the result of ten distinct weapons of linguicide that Smith Galer traces across the globe. We look at how the United States spent $180 million on revitalization since 2005, and how Ladino songs written inside Auschwitz document a language shift happening in real time, and why Smith Galer describes her own journey with her grandmother's dying language from the Italian Apennines as "palliative care."
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