What if joy was not the byproduct of language learning, what propelled it forward? My project is an experiment in designing a plurilingual analogue game inspired by Montréal’s linguistic chaos; a city where French, English, and like a zillion other languages swirl around in daily life, and where translanguaging isn’t just some academic term from applied linguistics, but a reality. Yet, Montréal is also the only city I’ve been on this planet where being bilingual can feel like a source of shame: francophones apologizing for their English, anglophones downplaying their French, newcomers treating their languages as burdens rather than assets in learning new languages. This project is a direct response aimed at reframing those narratives so Montréalers can finally feel like the cosmopolitans we truly are.🍸

The game I envision treats the wacky, mismatched, and low-key deep ways adults use language as both the rules and the raw material of play. The real outcome is that players will discover, perhaps for the first time, just how vibrant their own linguistic repertoires are. The treasure isn’t “fluency,” but the realization that we already carry a mosaic of languages within us, and each one is a piece of our story.

This project is rooted in a longing for “slow, meaningful play”. The most meaningful moments in my own language journey have always happened "in the wild": laughing over a fumbled sentence in some important context, inventing words, or communicating with gestures when vocabulary fails. I want to design a game that invites this kind of improvisational communication, where switching languages is as natural as rolling a die, and where the goal isn’t to “win,” but to be understood, to connect, and play.

The Plurilingual Playground is an invitation to explore language as identity, affect, and art. BLUE gives me the rare gift of time and permission to pursue the aesthetic and emotional side of language, to prototype mechanics, emotional lexicon cards, or memory-of-language prompts that turn plurilingual identity into play. This project is unique because it blends theory, lived experience, and analogue game design, not to teach a language, but to celebrate the ways we already use them.