The 27th March was chosen for the International Day of Multilingualism because 27th March 196 BC is mentioned in the Rosetta Stone exhibited at the British Museum in London. It is thanks to this fragment of a trilingual priestly decree that the Egyptian hieroglyphs could be decoded after many centuries.
Prof. Claudia Pellegrini inaugurated the new SprinT event for the 3rd-year classes with photos of the slab taken at the British Museum. She also explained the history of the precious exhibit, its way from Egypt to Napoleonic France and then to Britain and how scientists and linguists like Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion managed to decipher the hieroglyphs via the Demotic script and Ancient Greek at the beginning of the 19th century. The event continued with multilingual games and activities. More
Our library team, Petra Weiss and Prof. Petra Fliri, together with Prof. Pellegrini had organized a variety of multilingual games and activities. The aim was to celebrate multilingualism having fun with languages. Students played, for instance, Activity in different languages, or sang karaoke songs in all curricular languages but also in Urdu and Albanian. Some creative multilingual products such as multilingual roleplays of fairy tales or translations into South Tyrolean dialect of some Asterix scenes, were presented at the end of the event.
A selection of pictures will show how using languages can be fun.
Prof. Claudia Pellegrini
