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Martina Franca, Italy

Ermoupoli, Greece

Osor, Croatia

Ireland is now a country where many languages are spoken but most in the privacy of homes, not in public. The Mother Tongues Festival tackles that monolingual public space by offering a high quality artistic programme. 'Maybe we are saying these are not foreign languages – it's the way Ireland is now,' says Festival Producer Francesca la Morgia, 'More and more families live in bilingual or trilingual households.'

Somewhere in Europe a festival is underway. Every day brings a crisis. Somehow the big people in charge only ever arrive at the end. Only the two young interns, Sofie and Carlo, stand between triumph and disaster.

The festival held in late Spring in Bergen has the comfort of not just being one of Europe's most venerable among the group that started in the aftermath of World War II, it can trace its origins back a lot further – back to the determination of its greatest musician, Edvard Grieg, to bring the best of the world's performers to his native city.