The Lingua is a sculpture by American artist Jim Sanborn located at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.
Lingua is composed of two 16' tall cylinders, with text cut with a water jet cutter in Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Ethiopian, French, Spanish, Latin, Greek, and Iroquois. The texts are historical texts from as far back as 1400 BC.
The Russian-language section is a quote from Leo Tolstoys 1869 novel War and Peace (Volume 3, Part 1, beginning of chapter XXII).
The Chinese-language section is a piece of Chinese calligraphy work Lantingji Xu written by Wang Xizhi.