I wrote this song between February and April of 2019 after many years of letting it brew in my mind. It's written from the perspective of the words of an endangered language that has never been written down, and has only a few elderly speakers. There are hundreds of such languages out there.

See: http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/
http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/

I got the idea from a lecture by David Crystal about endangered languages. He said that a good way to spread the word about the plight of such languages might be for creative people to make art, or to write songs, stories, poems, etc about them. So this is my contribution to that effort.

This recording features me singing and playing the harp. You can see the score at: https://musescore.com/omniglot/echoesonthetongue

The words are as follows:

Echos on the Tongue

Chorus
Who will speak us when you’re gone?
Who will speak us when you’re gone?
All we are is breaths of air
Shaped by lips and teeth and tongue

Once we were on every tongue
Whispered, yelled and often sung
Telling tales of long ago
Bringing smiles and laughs in tow

Then the new words came along
And they told us that we were wrong
They pushed us out before we knew
And now we’re spoken by just a few

Soon those few of you’ll be gone
With no-one left to carry on
Echos on the tongue at best
When you’ve gone to take your rest

Who will speak us when you’re gone?
Who will sing us when days are long?
Who will whisper us late at night?
Who will shout us with all their might?

The spoken words at the end mean "We are still here" in various endangered languages - currently Welsh, Breton, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx.

Translations by Simon Ager and Lùthais MacGriogair.

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