New Language Discovered in Middile East - in Women's Names

Article from the independent.co.uk

Ancient language discovered on clay tablets found amid ruins of 2800 year old Middle Eastern palace
Friday May 11, 2012

Archaeologists have discovered evidence for a previously unknown ancient language – buried in the ruins of a 2800 year old Middle Eastern palace.

The discovery is important because it may help reveal the ethnic and cultural origins of some of history’s first ‘barbarians’ – mountain tribes which had, in previous millennia, preyed on the world’s first great civilizations, the cultures of early Mesopotamia in what is now Iraq.

Evidence of the long-lost language - probably spoken by a hitherto unknown people from the Zagros Mountains of western Iran – was found by a Cambridge University archaeologist as he deciphered an ancient clay writing tablet unearthed by an international archaeological team excavating an Assyrian imperial governors’ palace in the ancient city of Tushan, south-east Turkey.

The tablet revealed the names of 60 women – probably prisoners-of-war or victims of an Assyrian forced population transfer programme. But when the Cambridge archaeologist – Dr. John MacGinnis - began to examine the names in detail, he realized that 45 of them bore no resemblance to any of the thousands of ancient Middle Eastern names already known to scholars.

Because ancient Middle Eastern names are normally composites, made-up, in full or abbreviated form, of ordinary words in the relevant local lexicon, the unique nature of the tablet’s 45 mystery names is seen by scholars as evidence of a previously unknown language.

The clay tablet text originally formed part of the palace’s archive – used by local Assyrian imperial officials to record their administrative, political and economic decisions and actions.

The 60 women (including the 45 with evidence of the previously unattested language) were almost certainly being deployed by the palace authorities for some economic purpose (potentially a female-associated craft activity like weaving). Indeed the text mentions that some of them were being allocated to specific local villages.

Typical names, borne by the women – the evidence for the lost language – include Ushimanay, Alagahnia, Irsakinna and Bisoonoomay.

Now archaeologists and linguistics experts are set to analyse the mystery names in even greater details to try to discover whether the letter-order or letter frequency shows any similarities to previously attested ancient tongues to which this mystery language could be related.

The 45 women are thought to come from somewhere in the central or northern Zagros Mountains – because that is the only area in which the Assyrians were militarily active at the relevant time where the ancient languages are still largely unknown.

It’s likely that the women were compulsorily moved from their Zagros Mountains homeland and assigned to work near Tushan sometime in the second half of the 8th century BC – probably as a result of conquests carried out in the Zagros by the Assyrian kings Tiglath Pilasser III or Sargon.

The excavation of the palace at Tushan is being carried out by a German archaeological team directed by Dr. Dirk Wicke of Mainz University as part of an archaeological investigation into the ancient Assyrian city led by Professor Timothy Matney of the University of Akron in Ohio. Full details about the discovery of the mystery names are published in the current issue of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies .

David Keys is the Archaeology Correspondent for The Independent

Hints That All Languages Came from One Source

Aha!  The first book I read (years ago) on the origins of language and etymology, The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue, was by Dr. Merritt Ruhlen.  His premise is that all languages descended from one "Mother tongue" and I was totally caught up in his explanations and examples.  Ruhlen's work created a lot of controversy in the world of linguistics (to say the least).  Perhaps too suggestive of the "Tower of Babel" fable from Genesis in the Bible.  Personally, I have always thought the hypothesis behind the old fable made a lot of sense. Since the late 20th century science is on the track to proving that mankind sprang from a very small sample of anatomically modern human beings, and it makes sense that those human beings all spoke the same language and were very closely related.  Tower of Babel, anyone?

Now, a new researcher, in a new generation, has uncovered intriguing hints that may point to an original "Mother Tongue" origin of all languages.

From The New York Times
Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: April 14, 2011

A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated.

The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists.

The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most.

Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language. Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.

Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes.

This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.

Language is at least 50,000 years old, the date that modern humans dispersed from Africa, and some experts say it is at least 100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his work is correct, is picking up a distant echo from this far back in time.

Linguists tend to dismiss any claims to have found traces of language older than 10,000 years, “but this paper comes closest to convincing me that this type of research is possible,” said Martin Haspelmath, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Dr. Atkinson is one of several biologists who have started applying to historical linguistics the sophisticated statistical methods developed for constructing genetic trees based on DNA sequences. These efforts have been regarded with suspicion by some linguists.

In 2003 Dr. Atkinson and Russell Gray, another biologist at the University of Auckland, reconstructed the tree of Indo-European languages with a DNA tree-drawing method called Bayesian phylogeny. The tree indicated that Indo-European was much older than historical linguists had estimated and hence favored the theory that the language family had diversified with the spread of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, not with a military invasion by steppe people some 6,000 years ago, the idea favored by most historical linguists.

“We’re uneasy about mathematical modeling that we don’t understand juxtaposed to philological modeling that we do understand,” Brian D. Joseph, a linguist at Ohio State University, said about the Indo-European tree. But he thinks that linguists may be more willing to accept Dr. Atkinson’s new article because it does not conflict with any established area of linguistic scholarship.

“I think we ought to take this seriously, although there are some who will dismiss it out of hand,” Dr. Joseph said.

Another linguist, Donald A. Ringe of the University of Pennsylvania, said, “It’s too early to tell if Atkinson’s idea is correct, but if so, it’s one of the most interesting articles in historical linguistics that I’ve seen in a decade.”

Dr. Atkinson’s finding fits with other evidence about the origins of language. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert belong to one of the earliest branches of the genetic tree based on human mitochondrial DNA. Their languages belong to a family known as Khoisan and include many click sounds, which seem to be a very ancient feature of language. And they live in southern Africa, which Dr. Atkinson’s calculations point to as the origin of language. But whether Khoisan is closest to some ancestral form of language “is not something my method can speak to,” Dr. Atkinson said.

His study was prompted by a recent finding that the number of phonemes in a language increases with the number of people who speak it. This gave him the idea that phoneme diversity would increase as a population grew, but would fall again when a small group split off and migrated away from the parent group.

Such a continual budding process, which is the way the first modern humans expanded around the world, is known to produce what biologists call a serial founder effect. Each time a smaller group moves away, there is a reduction in its genetic diversity. The reduction in phonemic diversity over increasing distances from Africa, as seen by Dr. Atkinson, parallels the reduction in genetic diversity already recorded by biologists.

For either kind of reduction in diversity to occur, the population budding process must be rapid, or diversity will build up again. This implies that the human expansion out of Africa was very rapid at each stage. The acquisition of modern language, or the technology it made possible, may have prompted the expansion, Dr. Atkinson said.

“What’s so remarkable about this work is that it shows language doesn’t change all that fast — it retains a signal of its ancestry over tens of thousands of years,” said Mark Pagel, a biologist at the University of Reading in England who advised Dr. Atkinson.

Dr. Pagel sees language as central to human expansion across the globe.

“Language was our secret weapon, and as soon we got language we became a really dangerous species,” he said.

In the wake of modern human expansion, archaic human species like the Neanderthals were wiped out and large species of game, fossil evidence shows, fell into extinction on every continent shortly after the arrival of modern humans.

Discovery Reveals Unknown Language and Numbering System

From Physorg.com

Unearthed 400-year-old document shows how Peruvian natives used numbers
August 24, 2010 By Faith Sutter

In the early 1600s in northern Peru, a curious Spaniard jotted down some notes on the back of a letter. Four hundred years later, archaeologists dug up and studied the paper, revealing what appear to be the first traces of a lost language.

The back side of an early 17th century letter shows translations for numbers from Spanish to a lost language.
Photo by Jeffrey Quilter

“It’s a little piece of paper with a big story to tell,” said Jeffrey Quilter, who has conducted investigations in Peru for more than three decades.

Quilter is deputy director for curatorial affairs at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, as well as director of the archaeological project at Magdalena de Cao Viejo in the El Brujo Archaeological Complex, where the paper was excavated two years ago.

The writing is a set of translations from Spanish names of numbers (uno, dos, and tres) and Arabic numerals (4-10, 21, 30, 100, and 200) into the unknown language. Some of the translated numbers have never been seen before, while others may have been borrowed from Quechua or a related local language. Quechua is still spoken today in Peru, but in the early 17th century many other languages were spoken in the region, such as Quingnam and Pescadora.

Information about them today is limited. Even so, the archaeologists were able to deduce that speakers of the lost language used a decimal system like our own.

Quilter said that this simple list offers “a glimpse of the peoples of ancient and early colonial Peru who spoke a language lost to us until this discovery.”

“The find is significant because it offers the first glimpse of a previously unknown language and number system,” said Quilter. “It also points to the great diversity of Peru’s cultural heritage in the early colonial period. The interactions between natives and Spanish were far more complex than previously thought.”

The name of the lost language is still a mystery. The American-Peruvian research team was able to determine it was not Mochica, spoken on the north coast into the colonial period but now extinct, and pointed to Quingnam and Pescadora as possible candidates. Neither Quingnam nor Pescadora, however, have been documented beyond their names. There is even a possibility that Quingnam and Pescadora are the same language but they were identified as separate tongues in early colonial Spanish writings, so a definitive connection has not yet been established.

Preserving Ancient Languages: Eyak

From The Wall Street Journal Online
In Alaska, a Frenchman Fights to Revive the Eyak's Dead Tongue
Natives Take Dialect Lessons From Guillaume Leduey; Blurting Out 'Keełtaak'
August 10, 2010
By JIM CARLTON

CORDOVA, Alaska—Mona Curry recently stared teary-eyed at a film of her late mother speaking in the native-Alaskan language of Eyak at a tribal ceremony. Then she turned to a 21-year-old Frenchman for translation.

"She said that it's beautiful," Guillaume Leduey explained without hesitation. "It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you God."

Mr. Leduey, a college student from Le Havre, France, has made it his mission to bring the Eyak tongue back from extinction. Eyak tribe membership once numbered in the hundreds in south central Alaska, then dwindled over the past two centuries as other tribes and Western settlement encroached.

Ms. Curry's mother, Marie Smith Jones, was considered by Alaska historians the last native Eyak speaker when she died in 2008. Her descendants and others didn't become fluent in the language because of a stigma around speaking anything other than English in Alaska's native villages.

Photo: Jim Carlton.  Guillaume Leduey (center) gives an Eyak
lesson to Dune Lankard (left) and Mona Curry.

Lots of local dialects across the world face extinction, but few have attracted a preservationist as unlikely as Mr. Leduey, an aspiring sculptor who until June hadn't left Europe. That month, he journeyed to Alaska to study under Michael Krauss, a 75-year-old University of Alaska linguistics professor who knows conversational Eyak. Mr. Leduey set out to traipse in the footsteps of the tribe that once inhabited this gritty fishing village on Prince William Sound.

Versed in French, English, German, Chinese and Georgian, and able to sing at least one song in Lithuanian, Mr. Leduey says he can't fully explain why he took on the defunct tongue. "It's like I have an inner voice that tells me I have to do that," he says.

More than a thousand years ago, the Eyaks are believed to have settled in Alaska's interior before migrating to the coast, hunting and fishing along the way, historians say. They passed down their language through storytelling. While as many as 20 native dialects remain in Alaska, Mr. Krauss says Eyak is considered extinct because there are no fluent, native speakers.

Mr. Leduey's preservation quest is littered with linguistic stumbling blocks. Eyak bears little similarity to English or the Russian spoken by some Alaskan natives. Sounds for letters often are uttered from the back of the mouth, rather than the middle as with European languages. Eyak's vowels followed by an "n" are nasalized, while the "m" sound rarely is used. It wasn't until academics began studying it that the language was formally put in writing.

There are no obscenities. "If you want to insult someone, you call them a 'nik'da'luw,'" Mr. Leduey says, using the Eyak expression for "big nose," which means nosy. And there are a number of one-word sentences. "If you want to say, 'I'll kill you," it is 'ige'xsheh,'" he says.

To understand more about Eyaks, Mr. Leduey also learned to cook salmon in the ground, a native tradition. On an overcast day here last month, he dug a shallow pit in the front yard of Eyak descendant Pam Smith, a niece of Ms. Jones's. He tended a crackling fire to roast two red salmon, each wrapped in giant skunk cabbage leaves. After 90 minutes, the fish were warm but still raw, so Ms. Smith threw them into an oven.

Mr. Leduey's Eyak odyssey began at age 12, when he happened on the language while trolling through an online dictionary of languages in his hometown of Le Havre. By searching more online, he discovered Eyak appeared to have only one native speaker, Ms. Jones.

"I was like, 'Wow, one speaker left. I must do something to learn the language'," Mr. Leduey says. His parents were less than thrilled. "They don't think it's useful," he says.

With little online material on Eyak, Mr. Leduey obtained one of Mr. Krauss's texts on the subject, and turned to Laura Bliss Spaan, a filmmaker in Anchorage, Alaska, who directed a documentary about Ms. Jones. Ms. Spaan sent Mr. Leduey the film and some more of Mr. Krauss's Eyak texts.

In April 2009, Mr. Leduey showed off his Eyak skills to Ms. Spaan while she was visiting France. "We were outside one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Paris and Guillaume showed me some graffiti of an octopus," she says. "He instantly told me three different ways to say 'octopus,'" which is "tsaaleexoquh" in Eyak.

Earlier this year, Ms. Spaan suggested Mr. Leduey visit Mr. Krauss in Fairbanks, Alaska, where he teaches. After Mr. Leduey's June arrival, Mr. Krauss cloistered him in a room for up to five hours a day to pore over Eyak documents. To break the monotony, Mr. Leduey sang songs in Eyak to Scamper, the professor's Norwich Terrier.

Mr. Leduey also traveled to Cordova, where the Eyaks made their last stand against being swallowed up by civilization. Cordova boasts Eyak Corp., a legal entity for native groups in Alaska, with about 400 members. Membership is dominated by rival Tlingits, who helped take over the Eyak territory, along with white settlers, says Dune Lankard, one of about 50 in the corporation with Eyak blood. Bits of the language remain alive even though its fluent, native speakers have died.

"There are people talking like they're Eyaks but they're not Eyaks," says Mr. Lankard, a commercial fisherman.

In Cordova last month, some part-Eyaks showed Mr. Leduey a demolished village site and took him to a natural attraction called Child's Glacier, where a harbor seal leapt out of the icy water. "Keełtaak," Mr. Leduey blurted out, using the Eyak word for the animal.

Later stopping to inspect a roadside sign about Eyaks, Mr. Leduey caught a barely perceptible error. The sign uses the Eyak word "saqehl" for people who go by boat; Mr. Leduey said it should be "saqehł," with a bar through the "l."

About 10 to 15 people have shown interest in Eyak lessons, he says. Mr. Leduey recently huddled at a kitchen table with Mr. Lankard, 50, and Ms. Curry, 53, for a lesson. "Adate'ya," Mr. Leduey said for "silver salmon." Mr. Lankard struggled with the guttural sound. "I can't even say that," he says.

Despite the early stigma about their language, "it feels right to learn now," Ms. Curry says. "This will help keep my mom's memory and spirit alive."

Preserving Ancient Languages: Grabar

From panarmenian.net
Reverend Father Garegin Hambartsumyan: Grabar is not an extinct language, yet our negligence can turn it into such
August 11, 2010 - 18:15 AMT 13:15 GMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - Grabar is not an extinct language, yet our negligence can turn it into such, Reverend Father Garegin Hambartsumyan stated.

As the Reverend Father pointed out at August 11 news conference, Grabar is still used during church service, which makes it live on.

As the head of Tsirani cultural NGO Narek Ashughatoyan stated, free Grabar lessons are held under the organization aegis. To increase public awareness, Grabar: Language of Ancestors documentary premiere was held on August 10 in Yerevan.

“Grabar, the language our ancient literature was written in, takes us closer to our roots,” Narek Ashughatoyan emphasized at news conference.

In future, documentary screening in Armenian universities, as well as TV broadcast is planned.

More info:

Grabar Cheat Sheet - fun!  And some historical background on classical Armenian (Grabar).
Wikipedia info

I believe that, along with Sanskrit, Armenian is considered by linguists one of the "purest" languages still in use today showing directly relation to many proto-Indo-European words. 

Preserving Ancient Languages: Inuktun

From CNN.com
Scientist lives as Inuit for a year to save disappearing language
By Thair Shaikh, CNN
August 13, 2010 1:21 p.m. EDT

London, England (CNN) -- A British anthropologist is setting out on a year-long stay with a small community in Greenland in an ambitious attempt to document its dying language and traditions.

Stephen Pax Leonard will live with the Inughuit in north-west Greenland, the world's most northernmost people, and record their conversations and story-telling traditions to try and preserve their language.

The Inughuit, who speak Inuktun, a "pure" Inuit dialect, are under increasing political and climactic pressure to move south, says Leonard.

"They have around 10 to 15 years left in their present location, then climate change and politics will force them to move south and they will be assimilated into a different culture, into a broader community, and their way of life will be lost," Leonard told CNN.

Leonard, who flies out to Copenhagen on Sunday before heading to Greenland, says there are about 1,000 speakers of Inuktun, an undocumented language.

Although most Inughuit are trilingual, also speaking Danish and Greenlandic, their primary language is still Inuktun.

"There is no doubt that this is a major linguistic challenge... they speak a very pure form of Inuit, partly because of their geographic isolation. Their entire culture is based on a story-telling culture."
Leonard, an anthropological linguist at Cambridge University, England, is under no doubt about the physical and cultural hurdles that face him. The average temperature is minus 25 degrees Celsius, although it can fall to minus 40 degrees Celsius in the winter.

Inughuit, which is the name of the northern Inuits, are hunter-gatherers; they do not have a cash economy and the men can spend weeks away from home hunting for walruses, seals and other mammals. They still use dog sleds in the winter and kayaks in the summer.

Hivshu, an Inughuit who now lives in Sweden, helped Leonard establish contacts with his former community in Greenland.

He has written about the Inughuit way of life on his website: "Even before I went to school I began assisting my father when he was out hunting, summer or winter, no difference. That was the way I heard the stories about my ancestors and their songs told and sung by the old people as it was a tradition to tell the stories and sing the traditional drum songs of Inuit to all of us during the hunting."

Leonard says he is determined to become a part of their community and plans to hunt with the men if he is allowed.

He is taking solid-state audio recorders that should work in the freezing conditions and plans to produce an "ethnography of speaking."

That he hopes will be a permanent record that shows how their language and culture are interconnected.

More:
Linguist on mission to save Inuit 'fossil language' disappearing with the ice
Cambridge researcher will live in Arctic and document Inughuit culture and language threatened by climate change

Mark Brown, arts correspondent
The Guardian, Friday 13 August 2010

Restoring 'Lost' Languages of Native American Tribes

From The New York Times:

Indian Tribes Go in Search of Their Lost Languages
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: April 5, 2010
As far as the records show, no one has spoken Shinnecock or Unkechaug, languages of Long Island’s Indian tribes, for nearly 200 years. Now Stony Brook University and two of the Indian nations are initiating a joint project to revive these extinct tongues, using old documents like a vocabulary list that Thomas Jefferson wrote during a visit in 1791.

The goal is language resuscitation and enlisting tribal members from this generation and the next to speak them, said representatives from the tribes and Stony Brook’s Southampton campus.

Chief Harry Wallace, the elected leader of the Unkechaug Nation, said that for tribal members, knowing the language is an integral part of understanding their own culture, past and present.

“When our children study their own language and culture, they perform better academically,” he said. “They have a core foundation to rely on.”

The Long Island effort is part of a wave of language reclamation projects undertaken by American Indians in recent years. For many tribes language is a cultural glue that holds a community together, linking generations and preserving a heritage and values. Bruce Cole, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which sponsors language preservation programs, has called language “the DNA of a culture.”

The odds against success can be overwhelming, given the relatively small number of potential speakers and the difficulty in persuading a new generation to participate. There has been progress, though, said Leanne Hinton, professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, who created the Breath of Life program in California in 1992 to revive dormant languages in the state.

Representatives from at least 25 languages with no native speakers have participated in the group’s workshops so far, she said. Last month Ms. Hinton and a colleague at Yale received a federal grant to create a similar program based in Washington, D.C.

Rest of article.

Preserving Cypriot Maronite Arabic (CMA)

From the cyprus-mail.com
Bringing back to life an ancient language
February 07, 2010
By Sebastian Heller

A COMMUNITY living in northern Scandinavia may hold the key to how the Maronites can save their ancient language which dates back to biblical times.

Cypriot Maronite Arabic (CMA) is a distinct language composed of a mixture of Arabic and Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ and his disciples, but its use has been in decline for more than 30 years.

A seminar in Nicosia this weekend will look at ways to reverse this trend by focusing on the lessons learnt from the Sami community in far northern Scandinavia.

“The situation of the Maronite community in Cyprus is very similar to the situation of the Sami 30 years ago, where they were being assimilated by the dominant Norwegian group,” said Costas Costantinou, a professor from the University of Keele who has helped organise the workshop.

The Sámi, more commonly known as Lapps, initially faced conditions and challenges very similar to those of the Maronite community in Cyprus. Consequently the workshop is intended “To see what wisdom, what good practice can be taken from their case, as their example is very successful,” said Costantinou.

The total size of the Maronite community in Cyprus numbers around 5,500, and around 1,000 of them speak CMA. Traditionally, only the Maronites from the occupied village of Kormakitis spoke the language. Members of the community from the other Maronite villages - Asomatos, Karpasia and Ayia Marina - are all Greek speakers. Following the 1974 invasion, the majority of the Maronites from Kormakitis moved south and the language went into sharp decline.

“Up until the present day, it was exclusively from the home that we would learn the language. In the past, when we were in our villages, the whole context supported it, it was easy to speak our language,” said Peppinos Moussas, a Maronite currently living in Nicosia, “Afterwards, once we were scattered, it was difficult.”

Nowadays, large efforts are being made on a social level, and in an organised way, to rejuvenate the language and culture particularly for those under the age of 30.

Following a number of Council of Europe resolutions and recommendations, in November 2008 the Republic of Cyprus formally declared to the Council of Europe that it recognises CMA as a minority language. As a result “the state has various legal responsibilities from now on to protect the language,” said Moussas.

Like the Sami, who 30 years ago were in the position where the dominant Norweigian majority was trying to assimilate them into their culture, language and society, the Maronites do not want to be viewed as a “religious group” but as a “community”.

“There have been repeated calls from our representative, Mr Hadjiroussos, for us to recognised as such,” said Giorgos Skordis, a Maronite who co-ordinates the Xki Fi Sanna (Speak Our Language) educational programme involving approximately 30 students. He emphasised that the Maronites, though they have developed alongside the mainstream population for centuries (since the 7th century AD) have a different history, different heritage, religion and, of course, a distinct language.

“The existence of CMA provides the ‘hard fact’ that Maronites are a national minority with a distinct ethnic identity, not merely a ‘religious group’ that is compelled to affiliate to either the Greek or Turkish Cypriot community as provided by Article 2 of the 1960 Cypriot Constitution,” noted Costantinou in his article “The Protection and Revival of Cypriot Maronite Arabic” produced for the Peace Research Institute Oslo centre which is organising this weekend’s workshop.

The Xki Fi Sanna initiative is co-funded by the European Economic Area countries of Norway, Iceland, Lichtenstein and Switzerland (90 per cent of the cost) and the Republic of Cyprus (10 per cent).