Sarah Wood
















Dictionary of Lost Languages
A language is lost once the last surviving native speaker dies. Imagine being the last surviving speaker. Imagine no one understanding you when you speak as you want to.

The Dictionary of Lost Languages is an artist’s book. It may look like a dictionary but once you open the pages and start reading the alphabetical noting of every language that has become extinct, you will also find the stories that accompany the history, drawings and maps to underline the ways that first war, then imperialism and now globalistion are speeding up the process of language extinction.

The dictionary was designed as an intervention into the orderliness of a library’s system. The intervention suggests the possibility of humanising this system and by extension any system. It is a momentary call to the human and the idiosyncratic.

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