I can still feel the bite of that first Canadian wind on my hands, sharp and cold, as my mother’s determined grip pulled me up an endless staircase to my first day of school in Toronto. Only later did I realize she was probably just as afraid as I was.

Before I could blink, we stood outside a menacing door. I hoped it might never open, but it did. My first day of Grade 4 began.

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Just as I feared, school in a new country was isolating: a swirl of words I didn’t understand, games I had never played and faces I didn’t recognize. On Sundays, however, everything shifted. In the pews, the presider offered a familiar liturgy in the languages my ears recognized. Like in most Eritrean churches, the service was primarily in Tigrinya, the most widely spoken of Eritrea’s seven indigenous languages. But the portion that always captured my attention was delivered in Ge’ez — a ”dead” language that no Eritrean communicates in. If I closed my eyes, I was back home, where I didn’t feel so alien.

Dating back to the fourth century, Ge’ez is one of the world’s oldest classical languages. Rich and intricate, it contains nuances and expressions that still lack direct translations in Tigrinya. Unlike surviving languages, which evolve with each generation, dead ones remain frozen in time. In the case of Ge’ez, which faded from everyday use sometime between the 10th and 12th centuries as Tigrinya and Tigre became more popular in what is now Eritrea, it means that no child is inheriting it as their mother tongue.

In contrast to some of the world’s other dead languages — of which Ethnologue, a language catalogue associated with the Rosetta Project, estimates there are more than 600 — Ge’ez remains an integral part of the culture that created it. It survives in hymns, in ancient manuscripts and in the quiet devotion of generations of clergy who have kept it sacred. Within church walls, Ge’ez never stopped breathing.

For most of my life, hearing it on Sundays was enough. But after 17 years in Canada, I wanted to understand why those words reached me when few other things could — and what they were trying to say. So, in May 2024, I went back home to learn the story of Ge’ez.

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When I touched down to Eritrea — the most northern part of the horn of Africa, bordering Djibouti and Ethiopia — I’m quickly reminded that my mother’s land is a complicated place. The water comes and goes, electricity disappears during the middle of a conversation and potential war looms a border away. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been gone too long. I forgot how the sun reflects........

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