Music in Different Languages for International Mother Language Day

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Today, February 21, is officially International Mother Language Day. This day was first commemorated in 2000 by the United Nations in order to highlight the significance of native languages as a cultural asset and to foster the linguistic and cultural diversity of people around the world. Over 6,000 languages are spoken worldwide. Just some of them can be found in the RISM database when they are used as words to a song or other piece of music. Which ones are they, and how do you find them?

In the RISM online catalog, go to the Advanced Search and select Language. Enter the name of the language in English (though some have to be searched instead by their three-letter ISO code).

RISM has music in the following languages:

• Arabic
• Aragonese
• Catalan
• Chinese
• Church Slavic
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek, Ancient
• Greek, Modern
• Hebrew
• Hungarian
• Irish
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Latin
• Latvian
• Luxembourgish
• Lithuanian
• Low German
• Macedonian
• Middle English
• Middle High German
• Mongolian
• Neapolitan
• Northern Frisian
• Norwegian
• Occitan
• Persian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romani
• Romansh
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Sicilian
• Slavic
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Sorbian
• Lower Sorbian
• Upper Sorbian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Swiss German
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Welsh
• West Frisian
• Yiddish

Is your mother tongue on the list? We add to the list whenever we have a musical source with a new language. This month’s update to the online catalog will include West Frisian for the first time.

Image from pixabay.

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Category: RISM online catalog

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