When one group drew the card
“Why can the same language be different in different countries?”
Kateryna had just read the question aloud from a card about Swahili. In a classroom in Norway, she was playing a board game about language with Mika and Amani, two other recently arrived students. In the background information, they had listed Ukrainian, Tagalog, and Swahili, respectively, although their conversation soon revealed a much richer set of linguistic experiences.
Kateryna: “Ana doesn’t understand all the Swahili because it is different from the one she speaks in Congo. She thinks it is Tanzanian Swahili. Why can the same language be different in different countries?” Umm, yes. Dialect? Pronunciation? That affects it.
Mika: Yes, I think that’s true. It’s like dialect.
Amani: That’s almost the whole difference. Swahili in Tanzania is a bit different from Congo and Kenya. It’s almost not the same. How they pronounce it, how they speak. In my home country (Congo DR), they speak Swahili and put French and Lingala into it. In Tanzania they just speak, like, perfect Swahili.
Kateryna: Oh, okay. So it’s a kind of mix?
Amani: Yes, it’s a mix.
Kateryna: I understand that because in Ukrainian we have … it isn’t a dialect, and it isn’t official. It’s a mix of Ukrainian and Russian. Where I come from in Ukraine, we speak Surzhyk. Everyone can speak Ukrainian, and I can speak Ukrainian, Russian, and Surzhyk. But many people don’t like Surzhyk because it is mixed. It isn’t a pure language.
Mika: Ah, yes. A pure language. Some people say that.
Kateryna: Yes, not, like, perfect.
Mika: I think we also have many dialects, or maybe languages, because sometimes the differences are so large that it becomes almost a different language. But in Norway there are many dialects, and we still call it the same language.
A conversation that moved beyond the card
What interested me was how quickly the students expanded the question on the card. They began with Swahili and dialect, but soon the conversation travelled to French and Lingala, Ukrainian and Russian, Surzhyk, and Norwegian dialects. The card had become a point of departure.
Some of the words they used stayed with me. Mix. Pure language. Perfect Swahili. I heard in these words both boundaries between languages and judgements about particular ways of speaking. Amani contrasted Congolese Swahili, shaped by its connections with French and Lingala, with “perfect Swahili” in Tanzania. A few turns later, Kateryna introduced Surzhyk and explained that many people dislike it because it is mixed and “isn’t a pure language.”
As the conversation unfolded, expertise moved around the group. Amani drew on his experience of Swahili. Kateryna connected this with Ukrainian, Russian, and Surzhyk. Mika used their examples to think about the boundary between dialect and language. For a moment, each became the one who knew something the others did not.
The game behind the conversation
The game began with a question I had been carrying for some time: what might happen if recently arrived students were given time to talk about language itself? What would they choose to talk about? Which experiences would they draw on? And what might they learn from one another?
I wanted to create an activity that made room for these conversations and invited students to explore language together. A board game seemed worth trying. Together with Magic Knowledge, I began developing Snakk om språk! (Talk about language!) for recently arrived students aged 16–24 in Norway.
Students helped shape the game from the start. They piloted early versions, told us what worked, and asked for more action cards. That request turned out to be telling: across the sessions, there was laughter, joking, and experimentation with language. The playfulness mattered. Talking about language became a shared activity with room for curiosity and enjoyment.
Players move around a board and draw three kinds of cards. Conversation cards portray recently arrived students facing real-life situations or challenges involving language; tell-me cards invite personal reflections; and action cards set playful language tasks. QR codes provide translations in several languages, allowing students to move between languages as they play.
What the card opened up
The card offered a question, but the students made the conversation. Across the recordings, I noticed this repeatedly: students listened, asked questions, explained, translated, and checked that others could follow. I was moved by the care with which they often brought one another into the conversation.
This was what I had hoped the game might make possible. A single card brought different places, histories, and ways of understanding language to the same table. Here, Congo, Tanzania, Ukraine, and Norway became part of one conversation. At the same time, familiar ideas about languages being mixed, pure, or perfect became available for examination rather than simply being taken for granted.
In school, recently arrived students can easily be seen through the lens of what they do not yet know, especially Norwegian. Around this table, something else came into view. They met one another as people who already knew a great deal about language.