How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words

by 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?

“A vivid, hopeful portrait of how people around the world are staying connected to their linguistic roots.”—Gretchen McCulloch, author of Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Language, Linguistics, Research, History

304 pages, Hardcover

First published May 7, 2026

Reviews

[Mai H.]

Non-fiction November TBR

📱 Thank you to NetGalley and Crown

[Graeme · Rating 5 out of 5]

I often find books on language and linguistics can be overly academic and impersonal, which is why this book is so refreshing. The title might make you think this book is all about what's killing minority languages but if anything it's about the people themselves who speak these languages and their love and determination to keep them alive. It's made me determined to learn finally learn Welsh which I think means the book has done exactly what it's set out to do.

[Lucy Brewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book! So readable and engaging throughout, it introduced me to places, people, languages, music.

The only two negatives are it’s making me want to learn Napoletano on top of Italian which I do *not* have time for right now, and the final page had me in tears.

[Salomée Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't annotated a book like this in a long time. So many mind-blowing moments where I had to stop and digest what I had just learnt. A lot of it is so relatable and mirrors my own story, I, too, am a (great-grand) child of italian immigrants who uprooted their lives to pursue a better life for themselves and their children. I too, lost the language and a whole history when my great-grand mother passed. There's also a dialect that will probably die with my other grandmother when she leaves us too and the thought of it makes my heart ache. I can understand it but I cannot speak it. Essays and non-fiction can sometimes be dense and feel inaccessible. But Sophia Smith Galer weaves meticulous research with her own story, and the result is informative and moving. I urge everyone to pre-order it (with your local indie bookshop) and watch out for any writings and / or projects that Sophia will put out into the world next.