Apostrophes, emojis and languages at risk of disappearing will all come under the spotlight at next month's Wells Festival of Literature.

Authors Florence Hazrat and Sophia Smith Galer are both heading to the city for events examining how the way people communicate has changed – and what could be lost along the way.

The nine-day festival runs from Friday, 16 October to Saturday, 24 October, with several events already sold out.

Smith Galer will appear on Tuesday, 20 October, to discuss her book How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words.

The journalist and author began investigating language loss after the death of her grandmother, who spoke a northern Italian dialect which Smith Galer could understand but not speak herself.

Her book examines why languages disappear and what can be done to preserve them, looking at the effects of war, migration, nationalism, climate change and neglect.

The festival says more than half of the world's roughly 7,000 languages could disappear by the end of the century, taking with them generations of cultural knowledge and history.

Smith Galer's event runs from 7.45 pm to 8.45 pm on Tuesday, 20 October.

The following afternoon, Florence Hazrat will take audiences considerably further back through the history of the written word.

Her book On the Mark charts the development of punctuation from the centuries following the Roman Empire through to the digital age, including the emergence of emoticons and other modern ways of adding tone to written communication.

The book looks not just at the marks themselves, but at the people and arguments which shaped how commas, apostrophes and other punctuation came to be used.

Hazrat will appear at the festival from 4.15 pm to 5.15 pm on Wednesday, 21 October.

The two appearances form part of a programme bringing dozens of authors and speakers to Wells during October, with subjects ranging from history and current affairs to health, memoir, poetry and food.

Tickets for this year's festival are already selling quickly, with a number of events sold out.

The full programme and remaining tickets are available from the Wells Festival of Literature website.

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