Visit to Mundolingua – the Museum of Languages in Paris
by Richard Dabrowski, NML liaison for Maryland

In the shadow of the Church of Saint-Sulpice in the Latin Quarter of the 6th arrondissement you can find the privately-run museum of languages in Paris – Mundolingua.  I was able to visit the museum in September 2021 soon after its reopening following pandemic-related closure and I had the place to myself as the only patron at the time of my visit.

The museum is the personal vision of Mark Oremland, a New Zealander who studied linguistics in France and went on to start a travel agency between the two countries.  He collected all kinds of objects related to language and is particularly proud of an early version of the German ‘Enigma’ coding machine and a replica of the Rosetta Stone. 

Pre-pandemic the majority of visitors were school groups who were attracted to the many computer stations located on the two levels of the museum amongst the collected objects.  Each station presents information on a specific area of interest; for example, this screen presents “Non-Human Language.”

Essentially each station has PowerPoint presentations that have been translated into the six languages of the United Nations:  English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic.  The small device you can see in the bottom left of the photo is a receptacle where you can plug in headphones to hear embedded audio and videos.  The material within each option is presented in increasing levels of difficulty so that the content can appeal to various age levels.  Where possible, game-like activities are added to the station.

This language-identification quiz has short audio clips and the viewer has to guess the source by inserting the numbered peg into the lettered hole in the block on the left and then comparing the resulting pattern of cords with the diagram on the block on the right.  There are four variations to the quiz, which is quite tough – many of the languages to be identified are quite obscure. 

I spoke with the volunteer manning the museum entrance desk [full admission for an adult is 8 Euros] and he related that the museum is barely hanging on financially due to the pandemic closure as they do not receive any government support.  You can tell that the museum is a labor of love that could stand to be updated and is crammed into too small a space; that said, it has some charming displays and is well worth an hour of your time if in the vicinity.

For more information:  https://www.mundolingua.org/en/