From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.
I'm Bob Garfield.
This week, without Mike Volo, who's busy, dead serious here, deconstructing Jane Austen for an upcoming series.
I still haven't even read Sense and Sensibility, but I have just finished an illuminating, gorgeously rendered
and controversial book titled How to Kill a Language, Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words.
Author Sophia Smith-Gaylor traveled the world from big cities to remote villages, meticulously documenting the forces
that have reduced history's many tens of thousands of languages to a small surviving fraction.
These forces include migration, modern transport, imperialism, nationalism, globalization, ethnic repression,
and voluntary assimilation, all rendering the majority of local and regional languages dormant or extinct.
Sometimes an old woman dies, leaving behind not a single living speaker of a once vibrant tongue,
one that was not only the means of communication,
but also the storehouse of a society's knowledge and culture and precious artifacts utterly lost in translation.
It is very moving and sometimes very sad.
Much about Smith-Gaylor's narrative concerns her own grandmother, her own nana,
born in a mountainous northern Italian village where the native language was called Emilian.
Long since emigrated to London,
she communicated with her granddaughter only via English or Italian translated by Smith-Gaylor's trilingual mom.
But what nuance, wisdom and emotion was lost in the process?
And what is lost when the last handful of nanas are gone?
It is a poignant illustration of the stakes as languages