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?

To answer these questions, EUROTALES approaches languages by gathering data from below: this method underpins the Museum and the Research Laboratory on which it is based.
People, just like objects, constitute the body of language, because they preserve a stratification of languages layered more or less harmoniously one upon the other. In the same way, the places in which we live reveal the languages that have inhabited them over time, languages that have left traces of their presence in objects, landscapes and traditions. Our physical bodies harbour the intangible cultural heritage of language, just as urban and rural landscapes preserve it. Distinguishing the tangible from the intangible is no easy task; it constitutes the meaning of our museum.

EUROTALES represents the languages of Europe through three collections: RESONANCES, TRACES and MILESTONES, and the DIFFUSEUM. Our aim is to create forms of representation that capture the life of languages even when they have neither a name nor a canon, through:

(a) individual linguistic biographies, which reveal the multilingual nature of individuals and communities;
(b) memories of languages linked to material objects and scattered across the territory over time;
(c) a timeline that charts the milestones that underpin the history of European languages from the 6th to the 21st century.