TU/e Gets a Language Café on Campus

Yawning cats saying catchy phrases. Yummy, highly saturated photos of tzatziki. Beautiful photos from an excursion to the Eiffel Tower. Posters like these have taken over campus, sprouting up overnight. The perpetrators? Three international students from Bulgaria, Belarus and Syria. Every poster is stamped with a logo that looks suspiciously like a certain brown emoticon, yet logo designer Petar Kalinov laughingly denies it.

''It actually was inspired by an origin myth''

“I was always fascinated by the story of the Tower of Babel, where disunity took over once people could no longer understand each other,” says Petar, who is also very active in student communities: he organized TU/e’s first truck at Pride Eindhoven and volunteers as a confidential peer supporter. “The AI age makes language understanding easier than ever. It has revolutionized language learning and translation. However, stories like the one about Babylon are metaphors that can keep us grounded whenever we get too lost in technical development. It is important that we don’t lose our sense of humanity, or our ability to have an eye-to-eye conversation at a table.”

A Sense of Connection

For the participants, the human connection also seems to be the most important part. Jaime, a Spaniard in his final year of study, comes to the café to have conversations in Spanish and French. He joined the session to catch up with friends and meet new people. The same goes for the rest of the group at the Wednesday session. Lilla, an architecture student from Hungary, says a friend recommended she join to brush up on her Dutch. For language enthusiast Kanta, opportunities like this are rare. You can overhear him speaking Dutch, Japanese, French and German, switching effortlessly between them. And Farnoosh, an Iranian student from the Department of the Built Environment, has been to a language café before, during Summer University. Where Babel fell apart because no one could understand each other, the Wednesday café seems to work the other way around: a dozen languages at one table, and somehow everyone still follows the conversation.

Running on Goodwill

For now, TaalDecaf runs on goodwill. The founders run it on their own time, and their plan is to keep it going through the whole academic year rather than let it fade out after a few weeks. They are open to any support that would help them reach that goal.

An Open Invitation to Associations

The founders especially want study and student associations to get involved. An association could bring its members along, co-host an evening, or give a session a theme. Internationals get a reason to speak Dutch, and Dutch students get to meet people they might otherwise only pass in the corridor. Associations that want to take part can contact the organisers at taaldecaf@collegiumnovum.eu

• Where: Bakkie040
• When: every Wednesday, 12:30-13:30
• Who: anyone learning a language at any level
• Cost: free to join
• Socials: TaalDecaf website