05/06/2024
Italy
participants
The aim of the Babel Nights is to bring the language tandem to a much wider audience than the usual language exchange night. The keywords of this event are community and interchange. Community because the event involves the entire city of Bologna. Interchange because of the huge and very large diversity of different languages and backgrounds.
The Babel Nights are a series of four meetings in May aimed at fostering language exchange in the academic environment, without relying on English as the lingua franca. The event features rooms dedicated to the most requested languages (English, Italian, French, Spanish and German) and areas dedicated to free exchange between different languages. The evenings were open to the entire Bologna community, mainly to university students, but the pool of participants was eventually very diverse. The event was designed to host up to a maximum of around 700 students each evening, with the possibility of reaching up to 1000. Being a free event and co-organised with the University, the turn-out was extremely positive: around 500 people registered for each night, and 300 people showed up every evening, including internationals and locals. Ice-breakers were formulated to entertain the chatter, and ESN Bologna staff animated the rooms and conversations
