Past event
Resurrecting Lost Languages Through Poetry -- with Professor Peter Constantine Festival of Languages - Free
Over a quarter of the world's languages have less than a thousand speakers left and are now on the brink of extinction. More languages than are spoken today have become extinct over the years, their deaths often quiet and disregarded by the communities that once spoke them.
Can poetry, literature, words written by last speakers centuries ago, be used to revive a language?
In recent years indigenous peoples have been reconstructing their languages that have lain dormant for centuries with fascinating paleolinguistic detective work. Languages that lay silent for centuries—such as Mohegan and Massachusett in the United States, Cornish in the United Kingdom—are being reconstructed and taught to children as first languages.
In this hands-on-workshop, Peter Constantine will discuss different strategies that communities have used to bring back their traditional languages. Using the paradigm of these efforts in the workshop, the participants will bring back to life a Phoenician poem and its words that became extinct several millennia ago.
This event is part of the Festival of Languages, organised by the University of St Andrews School of Modern Languages. All events in the Festival programme are FREE and open to the public.