Doha: Qatar will be attempting to set the Guinness World Record for Most Languages in a Reading Relay on October 12 at the recently reopened Museum of Islamic Art (MIA).
MIA Director, Dr. Julia Gonnella told The Peninsula that they will try to break the record while reading the book The Little Prince by French aristocrat, writer, and military aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
“We will read it altogether here at the museum — in Urdu, English, Korean, to name a few languages,” she said.
In total, The Little Prince will be read in 54 languages by over 150 people. Each language will be represented by three persons: a reader, an expert and an understudy. The record reading attempt will take approximately two hours.
The languages include French, Arabic (Iraqi), Arabic Sign Language, Spanish, Irish, English, Dutch, Romanian, Portuguese, German, Tamil, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Serbian, Kannada, Croatian, Afrikaans, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Kyrgyz, Marathi, Amharic, Bengali, Kinyarwanda, Malay, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Chinese (Mandarin), Czech, Tagalog, Modern Greek, Hindi, Georgian, Hungarian, Indonesian. Also, Italian, Ukrainian, Kurdish, Malayalam, Montenegrin, Russian, Swahili, Thai, Turkish, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Urdu, Slovak, Korean, Gujarati, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Sanskrit, Kazakh, and Yoruba.
The event will also celebrate the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 which the country will host from November.
“This reading project complements the FIFA experience by celebrating the languages which will be spoken in Qatar during the World Cup,” said MIA on its website.
According to Guinness World Records, the most languages used in a reading relay record is to be attempted by a team of unlimited size, and is measured in number of different languages used in a reading of the same piece of literature.
“For the purposes of this record, a reading relay is defined as participants taking it in turns to read one or more lines of text,” it explained. Currently, no country is holding such record.
The Little Prince is a story of a child – the little prince that wanders the universe in search of wisdom. One of the best-selling novels in publishing history, the novella has been translated into hundreds of languages and has sold 200 million copies worldwide.
