The words the show’s dear listeners – or carissimi auditores – had been dreading came, of course, in Latin. “Nuntii Latini finiti,” was the blunt headline: after three decades on air, Finnish public radio’s weekly Latin news bulletin was over.

“It is a bit of a pity,” said Ari Meriläinen, the show’s producer for the past three seasons. “But it had to come to an end sometime. And 30 years is really quite a remarkable run. Especially for an idea as crazy as this.”

In terrarum orbe unicum – unique in the world – for most of its unexpectedly long life, Nuntii Latini was a five-minute review of world events, broadcast every Friday just after the main six o’clock news, in Latin, from Finland.

The Nordic nation has kept alive a noble tradition of classical studies, long considered an essential part of a sound humanist education. It also has its fair share of oddballs – some of whom are not averse to dabbling in Latin.

Requiescat in pace: Finland's Yle radio axes Latin news show after 30 years Read more

Jukka Ammondt, a literature professor, found fame in the 1990s by recording an album of Elvis Presley’s hits in Latin, including Ursus Taddeus, Glaudi Calcei and Menses Incertes (AKA Teddy Bear, Blue Suede Shoes and Suspicious Minds) and touring the US.

Some linguists also believe Finns have a special affinity with Latin because its grammar and sounds are similar to Finnish, with words formed using prefixes and suffixes and a distinction made between long and short vowels.

For whatever reason, Nuntii Latini was a hit, winning over a small but fiercely loyal audience with its four or five weekly items. It reported on world affairs from the death of Princess Diana and 9/11 to the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis, as well as major cultural and sporting events and Finnish news likely to be of interest to an international audience.

“It was precious,” said Christian Laes, a professor of ancient history at Manchester University, who along with other leading Latin academics led a global listeners’ protest imploring the Finnish broadcaster Yle to save the show when it was first threatened with closure in 2017.

“It showed people they were dealing with a real language, not some kind of riddle or puzzle,” he said. “That Latin really could be used for speaking. And it was a very clear Latin. Lots of listeners were surprised by how much they could understand.”

It was born, however, largely from a joke. In 1989, recalled Meriläinen, a legendary Finnish television and radio presenter, Hannu Taanila, had been invited to give a speech to a wine society in the northern Finnish town of Rovaniemi in the Arctic Circle.

“He toyed first with the idea of delivering it in French: this was a wine society, after all,” Meriläinen said. “Then his wife suggested he try Latin, so Taanila asked a Latinist to translate his speech. It was a catastrophe, of course: he couldn’t speak Latin. But afterwards he said: could we do the news in Latin? And the Latinist said yes.”

Reijo Pitkäranta, a lecturer in Latin at Helsinki University, would go on, with the help of two other eminent Latinists, Tuomo Pekkanen from Jyväskylä University and Virpi Seppälä-Pekkanen, also from Helsinki University, to edit and translate the Nuntii Latini bulletin for the next 30 years.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Reijo Pitkäranta reading the news in Latin for Nuntii Latini. Photograph: Jari Tanner/AP

There was understandable scepticism in the Yle hierarchy in the early days, said Outi Kaltio, a colleague of Pitkäranta who has read the news in the language of Cicero and Caesar for the past 15 years.

“But quite soon they started to receive feedback, not just from Finland but abroad,” Kaltio said. “People around the world were writing in to say, this is so cool, this is really awesome. It gained a really committed audience.”

On the radio in Finland, the show was a familiar fixture, with a regular audience of 50,000 – not insignificant in a country of 5.5 million. On shortwave, it found keen listeners from Belgium to the US, China and Vietnam, with more joining in later years as it became available on Yle’s website.

At home and abroad, many listeners were simply lovers of language, not Latin students or teachers at all. “Lots of people have studied a little Latin in school,” Kaltio said. “But others just like languages, and are interested. It’s fun and rewarding to see what you can understand, to recognise Donald Trump or Theresa May in Latin.”

A 2017 petition to postpone the show’s planned closure until its 30th anniversary last week gathered 3,200 signatures from 50 countries. One listener in Thailand told Yle that Nuntii Latini “taught us the lesson of being a citizen of the world, of caring about our past, where we come from”. Another spoke of “the unique perspective brought to global issues by expressing them in Latin”.

For teachers and students, it was a boon. Latin these days is taught through grammar and reading, said Kaltio, not listening and speaking, and Nuntii Latini offered “a vital auditory dimension”. For Laes, although he said Latin has never been a dead language, the show was a constant reminder of how alive it was.

The show’s three founding academics did not invent new words, relying on classical Latin’s 92,502-word vocabulary and subsequent medieval and other additions. Instead, said Laes, they built new combinations from old: acta diurna is a newspaper, aeroplanum an airplane, interete the internet, and cursus electronicus an email.

With selected vocabulary published on the programme’s website, the result was a Latin that was pure, but also fresh and modern, which won plaudits from aficionados around the world and made a major contribution to the contemporary study of the language.

When its time finally came, two of the programme’s three core academics accepted Yle’s argument that the broadcaster’s limited resources must be focused on Finland, and that after 30 years Nuntii Latini really had to to make way for new programming.

Pitkäranta and his Helsinki colleagues would have liked it to continue. “We are very sad it has ended like this,” said Kaltio.

All the same, said Laes, the world owes a small but significant debt of gratitude to Finland’s public broadcaster for keeping the show going for three decades. Nuntii Latini will be missed, he said, but he was “not afraid Latin will disappear. Far from it. We’ve always had these worries, and it has always survived.”

The Vatican announced this month it was launching a weekly news bulletin in Latin – Hebdomada Papae, or the Pope’s Week – Laes noted, as well as a half-hour Latin conversation programme.

With a Latin version of Wikipedia available online along with more than 40 active Latin Facebook groups, and the German station Radio Bremen now also broadcasting news in Latin once a month, this particular “dead language” does not look in bad shape.