“Wouldn’t it be easier if we all spoke the same language?” asks author Sophia Smith Galer in the conclusion of her book How to Kill a Language. I’ll be the first to admit that I am woefully monolingual, despite studying Latin in high school and college, and daily Duolingo has barely moved the needle on my Spanish fluency. A lifelong Trekkie, I always wondered about the choice to get around the linguistic problem of the Federation with universal translators instead of a unified official language. Suffice it to say, after reading Galer’s work, I think I have an answer.
As the book’s subtitle, Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words suggests, the lens through which Galer explores language loss is interested primarily in political and cultural power. The past and future both loom, threatening language from both sides. Colonialism is, of course, a primary driver of language loss, but it (and its aftershocks) are only one piece of the puzzle. How you’re reading this right now is even culpable—humans do so much more of our communicating in writing than we ever have, yet the vast majority of human languages are only spoken. The book’s urgency is laid bare in its introduction: humans may lose as many as half of the languages currently spoken in as little as one hundred years.
And so what? What does it matter if languages die away? Isn’t that just the natural order of social evolution? How to Kill a Language returns frequently to the notion that language is not just a vehicle to convey meaning but a means to understanding how a group of people perceives the world. Folklore and indigenous knowledge are encoded right into the words used to convey them. If most languages are not written, what will we forget? What have we already forgotten?
The book is structured around ten case studies, examples that speak to trends among languages most at risk. Language loss is the collateral damage of both nationalism and globalization. Galer explores how nations use linguicide as a tool of assimilation, as in the case of Italian under Mussolini and what Ukrainians are currently experiencing in the midst of the ongoing Russian invasion. Immigration and the globalized economy pose ongoing threats to heritage speakers of languages in their new countries as well languages like Dagbani, whose speakers are native to locales at high risk of devastation from climate change, and therefore diaspora.
How to Kill a Language, despite the cheeky title, is an optimistic book at its core. Galer pays particular attention to various projects toward language preservation and restoration. Indigenous communities in the Americas are working to rebuild their languages, as in the cases of Karuk and Kichwa. There is a reverence to the chapter about how the Kurds have maintained their language despite their frequent criminalization and official statelessness.
European languages are, on the whole, overrepresented in this book. This is perhaps to be expected, as the author’s interest in the subject stems from her own family linguistic history—the book literally begins and ends with Italy. It’s clear that Galer selected the languages intentionally to encompass as much of the world as she could without having to repeat the same narratives. East Asia, Oceania, and the Pacific Islands are interesting but not detracting omissions.
The inclusion of Hebrew is an interesting—and potentially controversial—choice. Hebrew is the most successful language revival in modern history. The language was never fully dead, kept alive in religious ceremonies and sacred texts, even as vernacular Hebrew faded over two thousand years ago. It was revived in earnest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hebrew is the official language of Israel, which is engaged, as Galer notes, in nationalistic linguicide of its own, against Arabic and many others, including another language profiled in this book, the Sephardic dialect of Ladino.
While the idea of a universal translator raises its own questions about AI, I think I better understand the choice to opt for translation over a ‘Federationese’: there’s too much to lose. How to Kill a Language is a call to action, a plea to preserve language diversity starting with our own families, if we can. Some readers may come away with the completely opposite conclusion upon reading this—maybe the price of language preservation is too high, maybe it is an attempt to stymie social progress—but at least we can talk about it with our shared language.
NONFICTION
How to Kill a Language
By Sophia Smith Galer
Crown
Published July 7, 2026
