Worldwide Languages, Self-Empowering with Poetry

In 2021, the Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee of PEN International launched “A hundred years, more languages than ever”, a project aiming to give visibility to the work of writers expressing themselves in indigenous or minoritized languages, through a collection of engaging video poems.

In the second year of this project, we published one poem per day in a wide variety of world languages, echoing those beautiful and yet for many, unknown languages, and sharing this space with all PEN centres. For a whole month in 2022, to mark Mother Language Day (February 21st) and World Poetry Day (March 21st), we travelled around the world accompanied by those languages. 

While languages are being lost tragically month by month, many speakers and writers from indigenous or minorized communities are taking their future into their own hands. They simply do not want to be the last speakers. From the south of Argentina to the tropics of the Philippines, from the Volga in Russia to South Africa, dozens of writers have submitted their recordings in the most extraordinary languages – some of them with just a handful of speakers committed to preserving their native tongue.

Find out more here.