The Pluriliteracies Board Game: Discover Belgium First Edition

Pages 4 and 5 (cards without QR code) to be printed and cut out

What if we told you that you can understand a language without speaking it? That although it may feel like a language across the world from yours, with different roots and a different alphabet, is completely incomprehensible, you may actually understand it more than you think? Avez-vous déjà entendu l’expression “c’est du chinois” pour parler de quelque chose d’incompréhensible, de compliqué, d’abscons ? En jouant à ce jeu, vous vous rendrez compte que, en réalité, vous pouvez comprendre le chinois…

This feeling of complete incomprehension towards a foreign language is, in many cases, psychological, in the sense that we tend to picture languages as completely isolated from one another. In reality, languages share a rich history with similar roots, grammars, vocabulary and prosodic patterns. Let’s take an example that we all love: chocolate in English and in Spanish, chocolat in French, Schokolade in German, which might seem predictable… but did you know it’s also çikolata in Turkish, شکلات (shokolat) in Farsi, 巧克力 (qiǎokèlì) in Mandarin Chinese, шоколад (shokolad) in Ukrainian, chokleti in Swahili? This means that you may be able to understand what a sentence is talking about in a completely different language than yours, once you identify similar words, phrases or intonation. Languages are not bubbles isolated from each other; learning a language is not about exploring a completely separate world than yours; our world is much more interconnected than once thought. 

This board game is about understanding and linking different languages, in line with several innovative concepts. This includes receptive multilingualism, which is mutual comprehension while speaking different languages by hearing one language but responding in another, and pluriliteracies, the heart of our project, in which we see the world as interconnected: different cultures, different languages, different modalities, different technologies, all have links between them. Nowadays, it’s essential to hone all of these skills to be able to interact and connect with people from various backgrounds, in order to become better global citizens.

We take inspiration from Fanny Meunier’s Le Grand Livre des Musiques: A Miller’s Tale, a children’s book using music as a meaningful metaphor for language. In it, she describes a world where, although everyone is aware of the existence of many different instruments of all kinds, everyone listens to the violin, because it’s easier, more accessible, and the only music sold in stores. Eventually, children realise it is possible to have a house full of different kinds of music that can coexist, creating a beautifully diverse ecosystem of music. A diverse ecosystem of languages is what we strive to reach with this board game: highlighting the beauty of each one and, most importantly, realising how interconnected they all are.

We hope you enjoy the game, que vous vous rendez compte des liens infinis entre les merveilleuses langues de notre monde, y que gracias a estos vínculos podréis apreciar un mundo plurilingüe e interconectado. 

We’d like to give a special thanks to the following people for helping us with translating and recording the languages:
-    Isabel Pérez Fernández for English, French and Spanish
-    Daria Romanchuk for Ukrainian
-    Francisco Pérez Cañado for Italian and German
-    Ruiyuan Wang for Mandarin Chinese
-    Romina Kahforoushanmayani for Farsi and Turkish 
We used AI Studio to generate Dutch.