Journalist Sophia Smith Galer who learnt French and Spanish at school  and added Arabic at university, travels across continents and generations to chart How to Kill a Language. She travel to Ghana to Kurdistan to explore minority languages that cling on, despite repression and neglect, and interview their speakers. In Ecuador, she sees first hand how shame deters parents from passing Kichwa onto their children. In Oman, she learns about languages with roots older than Arabic but never officially recognised. Smith Galer rushes to the 93-year-old emigrée’s beside in north London. In Italy, near Placenza where she grew up, she searches for … Continue reading Linguicide: cultural emergency, as half of 7,000 languages due to disappear this century