HELSINKI — Leah Whittington, an English professor at Harvard, catches the news bulletins on her iPod while strolling to classes. Daniel Blanchard, a professional countertenor in Paris, used to listen on shortwave radio, but now he uses an iPod, too. The BBC? NPR? No, it’s a weekly summary of world events and news broadcast by Finnish state radio — not in Finnish, but in classical Latin.

Nobody knows exactly how many listeners the Latin program reaches. “Tens of thousands is my wild guess,” said Sami Koivisto, a reporter in the station’s news department. But it seems clear that the Internet is injecting new life into a language often described as dead.

No, there are no traffic reports from the Appian Way, nor does the station assign a political reporter to the Forum. But, on Friday evenings before the main news broadcast, the Finnish Broadcasting Company presents five or six short news stories in Latin. In recent weeks, the subjects have included the financial crisis in Cyprus, an unusually brilliant aurora borealis and the election of Pope Francis.

“There are no scoops,” Mr. Blanchard, 37, said recently, over coffee. “But it is a great way to hear the news.” A request to the French national broadcaster to do something similar, he said, failed to produce a response.