Nuts and Bolts: endangered poetry

It's a delightful fact that people visit The Word Den from all over the world. At the moment of writing the largest number of readers are in France, but last week it was Italy, and quite often it will be the USA or Russia or Ukraine.

Everyone is equally welcome, of course, whether they're from the largest country in the world (Russia) the most populous (China) or tiny places like the island of Réunion, or the even tinier island of Sint Maarten (which is, really, only half an island).

At the moment, thrillingly, somewhere called Unknown Territory is in the top ten, and I'm amazed there's anywhere in the world that can't be recognised by Blogger.

All this means that you're a wonderfully diverse lot, and the reason this is important is that there's an organisation in London called the Endangered Poetry Project which needs the help of people like you.

The inspiration for the project has come from the observation that many extinct languages only survive in fragments of songs or poems. As UNESCO believes that perhaps half the world's languages will be extinct by the end of this century (we're losing as many as one language every two weeks) Chris McCabe, the project's librarian, is convinced that recording and storing poems from endangered languages is a matter of great urgency.

The project has poems in Faroese, Kristang and Alsatian (do make up your own joke, here) and quite a few other languages, but it needs more. It needs every endangered language in the world.

So if you know a poem in an endangered language then the Endangered Poetry Project would love to hear from you. 

Please. It's urgent, so do forward a link to this post to anyone who might be able to help.

Instructions on sending poems can be found HERE.

Poem To Say Today: one in your own first language.

Here's an anonymous poem in mine:

World is vast and wide.
So much out there to explore.
Right now, let's eat lunch.