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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

This week I'm very pleased to be joined by Sophia Smith Gailer, whose first book is How to Kill a Language, Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words.

Sophia, welcome. Your book tells us that languages are dying off in the world

at a faster rate than ever before in human history. Is that so? Yes, it's a little depressing,

isn't it? That's why I thought it was important to hurry up and write about it.

Somebody writes, why is that a bad thing?

Maybe that's an obvious question, but...

An obvious question, and increasingly I feel compelled to answer it

because I get asked all the time.

You know, surely when a community loses a language,

they just speak another, it's not that bad.

Why is a language important?

And I stop and think, gosh, would someone ever ask me,

why is culture important? Why is history important? Why is memory important? And for me,

I would position language in exactly the same space. A language represents a people, a place, time that's past, present,

and future, and it can be incredibly, understandably distressing for a community to lose their

language. Well, you start with something that does bring that home and you sort of personalise it.

I mean, the kind of root of this book is your relationship

...