Languages are disappearing, and the problem is political

Sophia Smith Galler’s How to Kill a Language introduces the many methods that are used to coerce people into taking up dominant languages at the expense of their own. These include massacres, dispossession, forced relocation, criminalisation and public humiliation, as well as more subtle techniques, like economic pressure and political indifference. Each chapter of How to Kill a Language takes a close look at one of these techniques and tells the story of how it has been used against a…