An Irish artist's new exhibition draws a line between Hawaiian and Irish, two colonized languages now in the middle of grassroots revivals — a hopeful story for anyone trying to reclaim a lost mother tongue.

• The show puts Ōlelo Hawaiʻi and Irish side by side, using photos of Irish stones and Hawaiian lava to show how each language grew straight out of its own land.
• Irish nearly died with the famine, which killed or drove out half the country — most of them Irish speakers — and later school policies made kids resent the language.
• Hawaiian is now one of the fastest-reviving native languages in the U.S., and both revivals are being led by young people rather than governments.
• Both languages carry deep local knowledge: Hawaiian has hundreds of words for rain, Irish has dozens for stone, each one describing something people actually needed to name.
• The harder problem is emotional — people who lost fluency often feel too ashamed to speak, so online groups for long-term emigrants are becoming a lifeline.

Outlook: A follow-up exhibition opening in March will push further into oral language and the body, with hopes of bringing the current show back to Hawaiʻi.