120: How (not) to kill a language - Interview with Sophia Smith Galer

Narratives about smaller languages often focus on the death and endangerment sides of the story. There's generally less on the social and political reasons why some languages are favoured at the expense of others, and how community members are working on reconnecting with their languages. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic with Sophia Smith Galer about her new book, How to Kill a Language. We talk about Sophia's personal experience with Italian dialect from her nonna and mum growing up, how she moved from BBC journalism to vertical video about language, and how those things combined into writing a book highlighting the active ways that languages are suppressed by educational policies, shaming parents into not passing down their language to their children, colonial violence -- and what community members are doing to fight back. We also talk about travelling on a budget, talking with diaspora speakers, and how Sophia started an Italian language cafe in London to create the welcoming language practice space she wished she'd had. Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice: https://pod.link/1186056137/episode/dGFnOnNvdW5kY2xvdWQsMjAxMDp0cmFja3MvMjQwMjc5ODEzOQ Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/828057782684205056/transcript-episode-120-how-not-to-kill-a Announcements: In this month’s bonus episode we go Behind the Zines with our technical editor Leah Velleman and get enthusiastic about the process behind making the first four Lingthusiasm zines! We talk about We talk about how Leah got into linguistics through Lord of the Rings and conlanging, her pivot from PhD fieldwork to technical editing, and a very brief history of zines. We also talk about why Leah decided to go rogue with the formatting for her diminuitive zine about diminuitives, where the meat clarinet comes from, and comedic timing for most effectively offering people zines. Finally, a sneak peek at some future zine topics we're working on and at our upcoming anniversary plans so you can start scheming with us. Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 110+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds: https://www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm/posts/bonus-115-behind-168364779 For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/828057294680080384/lingthusiasm-episode-120-how-not-to-kill-a