LONDON: From Assyrian to Irish Gaelic, Britain’s National Poetry Library is launching a major project to collect the poetry of thousands of languages in danger of dying out, and preserve them for future generations.

According to Unesco, of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world more than half are endangered, with one dying every two weeks. For the library, Chris McCabe said: “By the end of the century, Unesco estimates that half of our languages will be lost, and when languages go, their poetry goes too.”

The library marked Thursday’s National Poetry Day with the launch of an international appeal for well-known poems in endangered languages.

It will collect the works sent in by members of the public for its archives, working with Soas University of London to preserve at least one poem from each language, alongside an English translation.

The appeal coincides with a more local conservation effort from National Poetry Day, which has partnered with BBC local radio to find distinctive regional words from around the UK.

From Berkshire’s “cheeselog”, or woodlouse, to the West Midlands’s “bobowler”, or large moth, the words have been used as inspiration for new commissions, which are being broadcast by the BBC.

“It’s such a beautiful word,” said Liz Berry, who took on bobowler. “I think of dialect words as pieces of treasure, which can carry history - they really can conjure up the lives of those gone before us in one utterance. It’s a beautiful, magical thing.”

“If we lose these regional and national differences in languages we lose so much more than just the words,” said Hollie McNish, this year’s Ted Hughes prize winner, who wrote about cheeselog. “It would be like what happened with tomatoes once the supermarkets took over: they all started being forced to conform — same colour, shape, size — and all the diversity was lost. I hope, and think, the opposite is happening with regional languages now, and we’ve appreciated the diversity.”

Lamassu, who is working with Iraqi Assyrian refugees to preserve the poems they are writing on scraps of paper in refugee camps, said:

“Second to Chinese, [Assyrian] is the most ancient language which has been spoken and written continuously until today, and it is the language of a people that our modern civilised world is based on.

“Any loss of any language is a loss for humanity overall … No language should die, because they are all beautiful.”

—By arrangement with the Guardian

Published in Dawn, September 29th, 2017