A World of Language
Mundolingua is the only museum of its kind in the entire world. Hidden in a cavernous building that's deceptively crammed into a small façade on rue Servandoni in Paris' sixth arrondissement, a trip to Mundolingua is one of the most informative museum visits possible in Paris. For an entry fee of 7€ (or 5€ upon presentation of a valid student ID), visitors can see and use interactive presentations detailing every facet of the study of linguistics and language. Each subtopic is given its own computer kiosk, complete with an adjustable screen made from wood, simple pulleys, and cinder blocks as counterweights. The founder, according to one of the workers, was a lover of DIY.
The museum was founded in 2013 by Marc Oremland, an expat from New Zealand, to fulfill his goal to “create an entertaining place devoted to language and linguistics. And the founder's vision was for a museum that spread beyond single-subject studies like the programs and exhibits at all the other linguistics museums.
The basement of the museum with interactive displays.
Topics covered include every subfield of linguistics ranging from regional languages, language acquisition, signed languages, code, slang, invented languages, etc. All of this is bundled in a way that makes it so you can walk in without any prior knowledge or study into the field of linguistics and still understand what everyone's talking about.
To demonstrate the evolution of languages, for example, the basement level includes a huge “language tree” made from paper. This illustrates simply the connections between the world’s diverse languages and their origins.Some stations are complimented by other interactive activities and games in order to make it fun and easy to understand broad concepts.
One of my personal favorites is a large wall of building blocks with sentences printed below each shelf in multiple languages. Each building block corresponds to an individual morpheme — the smallest unit of meaning in a word — allowing visitors a visual representation of differing syntax and morpheme distribution between languages. Other specialized displays include an International Phonetic Alphabet sound board, as well as a game where visitors can attempt to identify French regional accents, foreign accents speaking French and languages from across the globe.
The phonetics board at the museum, showing where sounds are produced.
The museum also includes a small library of texts in a multitude of languages, as well as a viewing room where visitors can watch the museum’s collection of films. All of these interactive exhibits and opportunities for visitors to discover a significant piece of our daily life that we always seem to take for granted. The entire museum is available to be viewed in any of the six official languages of the UN: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.
Mundolingua
10 rue Servandoni, 75006 Paris
7 days a week; 10AM to 7PM.
