“WHERE WOULD we be without words?” That’s the question the founder of Planet Word, a language museum planned to open in the District’s historic Franklin School in 2019, asks on the project’s website. It’s a good question, and the museum devoted to answering it will make a welcome addition to downtown D.C.

As it turns out, the Franklin School is already something of a words museum: When it opened in 1869, the building served as a model for the District’s fledgling school system. Its brick facade, featuring a bust of Benjamin Franklin, pays tribute to the promise of public education. In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell tested a precursor to the telephone from the school’s rooftop. And Charles H. Townes came up with the idea for the laser — one of history’s most famous acronyms — while sitting on a park bench in Franklin Square just across the street.

For years, though, the schoolhouse has stood empty, even as the District has sought to redevelop its deteriorating interior. Most recently, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) pulled the plug on a 2014 plan to turn the school into a center for contemporary arts, citing concerns about the venture’s financial viability. That’s less of a worry for Planet Word: Founder Ann Friedman has pledged to pay the $20 million or more that it will take to restore the Franklin School building. It could take as much as $30 million more to transform it into a high-tech hub for language and literacy. After that, the museum will seek contributions — but Ms. Friedman is committed to keeping admission free of charge.

Plans are still taking shape — Ms. Friedman hopes for a “prepositional playground” and a cast of characters to include “Question Mark” and “Spelling Bea,” as well as a retail area, a restaurant, an auditorium and classrooms — but it strikes us as a great idea. Planet Word will be the first interactive museum of its kind in the world, and the seat of American government seems the perfect place for it. The museum will celebrate communication and literacy, both essential to the civic engagement upon which democracy depends.

That offers one answer to Ms. Friedman’s question: Without words, we would have a much harder time shaping the world we live in. But the power of words also operates on a smaller, more idiosyncratic scale — whether it is emotional, like the frustration of the perfect phrase hovering just out of reach and the satisfaction when it finally comes to you, or personal, like a private joke that means something only among friends or family. In her note, Ms. Friedman offers another answer of her own: Without words, “we would be less human.” The District should welcome her museum as a chance to understand why.