Finnish Radio Broadcast Keeps Latin Language Alive

HELSINKI - Latin, that most famous of dead languages, is alive and spoken in Finland, where the national radio company broadcasts a five-minute news summary completely in Latin every Friday afternoon.

The show, titled "Nuntii Latini" (Latin News), began in 1989, when Hannu Taanilla, chief cultural editor of the radio broadcasting company YLE, asked Latin professor Tuomo Pekkanen and a student if they would do a few Latin spots on a weekly news magazine. Those short segments garnered so much feedback that YLE soon gave Pekkanen and his crew their own weekly show.

"We started transmitting just in Finland," Pekkanen said. "After one month we switched to short wave. We received an enormous amount of letters from many countries, and I'm still surprised, after nine years doing the same job."

The weekly transcripts of "Nuntii Latini" are available on the World Wide Web at http://www.yle.fi/fbc/latini.html immediately after they are written. Every two years YLE publishes those reports in a book, along with a glossary of all the new phrases, plus translations into English and Finnish. Modern phrases often translate almost exactly. For example, "rapid-reaction forces" become "cohortes reactionis rapidae."

Listeners can e-mail questions to Pekkanen and his assistants, who field queries ranging from the political to the grammatical. The only catch is that all the messages, and the responses, must be in Latin.

Teachers from Germany to Italy to the United States have used the texts of his broadcasts in their classrooms. According to YLE, this is the only regular broadcast in Latin in the world, outside the Vatican. While there have been other attempts to broadcast over the radio in Latin, mostly in Germany, those broadcasts have been sporadic at best.

The broadcast, books and Web site have helped to make the University of Helsinki and the city itself something of a center for Latin study. Last year, the International Convention for Promoting Latin in Education held its annual conference here.

Many students in Finnish universities, depending on their courses of study, are required to study Latin.