Who built Thebes of the seven gates? wondered Bertold Brecht in a famous poem.

How can we give body and voice to the languages of Europe and the variety of ways in which people living in Europe now and in the past communicate? How can we acknowledge, describe and preserve the languages spoken and written today, in their dynamic relationships across the continent? Who 'owns' a language, and in what forms? Are national languages, official languages, popular or demotic languages, minority languages, vernaculars, dialects, creoles and grammelots really all the ways in which languages manifest themselves? What exactly do these categories encompass and are they adequate to classify the myriad ways in which human communication occurs? What memories do languages leave on objects and places?