Latin making a comeback?

An interesting trend is developing:

For students of a dead language, the undergrads in Initiation to Latin are a remarkably lively bunch.

They chat animatedly at the start of class before grabbing pens and laptops and turning to the teacher's lesson on the ablative, nominative and genitive. These first-year University of Montreal students are a small but emerging breed that had been given up for extinct on Canadian campuses: Latin lovers.

The Latin language may be dead, but rigor mortis has yet to set in. The language of Julius Caesar is finding renewed life among members of the Twitter generation, who are helping shake off Latin's long association with tweedy scholars and soporific high-school classes.

As a result, Latin is enjoying a marked, if modest, revival.

Enrolment in college- and university-level Latin is up across the country, according to the Classical Association of Canada.

The University of Montreal's introductory Latin class was so popular last year that students had to be turned away, and this year, enrolment swelled to 60.

York University, which doubled its number of introductory Latin courses a few years ago, is starting a course next year to train high-school Latin teachers.

In the article it is stated that this new-found interest in a dead language may be related to a feeling among today’s generation that they have missed out on something – since Latin is no longer offered at high schools (for the most part anyway).

All I can say is that Latin was mandatory for me at age 12, and I’ve never regretted it.

Comments

[SUZANNE]

I so wish I could have learned Latin. It just adds a little something to your general culture.