Guest speakers will invite audiences to experience the social and mental benefits of language learning with interactive word games, songs, crafts and other activities. Discover how engaging with non-English cultures sharpens our thinking, enhances creativity, and expands economic opportunities.

With World Culture Community Nights, the nonprofit World Language Initiative- Montana celebrates Montana’s multi-lingual past, present and future with stories, activities and conversation around language and culture. At our event series in the Emerson Weaver Room, we invite community members to see how non-English-speaking cultures enhance our ways of understanding and expressing ourselves. International and multilingual guest speakers will give interactive presentations on languages that WLI-MT’s international coaches teach at area schools, workshops, and businesses. Audience members might read a short poem aloud in French, Japanese or German, dance a few steps of salsa or polka together, or write their names in Arabic or Chinese. Other engaging activities include “human bingo,” where participants will circulate around the room with multiculturally themed bingo cards to quiz each other.

The room will swell with voices and gestures and most of all laughter. People share memories and bits of knowledge and pleasure directly tied to non-English languages or cultures. With arts and craft projects, participants will take home a memento of the evening that reminds them of their shared experience with other cultures and each other. Stories and conversation will show how all languages reflect an indigenous and immigrant history that continues to evolve through our lifetimes and beyond.