Summary
Journalists Peter Hitchens and Oliver Kamm, radio presenter and comedian Ellis James, languages expert Ross Perlin, Diana Sutton director of The Bell Foundation and podcaster and academic Reetika Revathy Subramanian join Matthew Sweet for a conversation about how language unites and divides us.
Ross Perlin's book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues was the winner of the British Academy Book prize and he is in London for the British Academy Summer showcase. Reetika Revathy Subramanian has been chosen as one of six researchers in residence at BBC Radio 4 in the coming year on the New Generation Thinkers scheme run in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is a Senior Research Associate, School of Global Development at the University of East Anglia and hosts the Climate Brides podcast. You can also find a recent episode of Free Thinking exploring peace which features another of the researchers in residence Ashleigh Percival-Borley, a former soldier who is now a military historian based at the University of Durham.
Producer: Debbie Kilbride
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Can I just say? |
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| 0:08.8 | Different paces, different heights. |
| 0:10.6 | The roof is buckling. |
| 0:11.9 | Where you can also listen to live sports commentary. |
| 0:14.2 | It's right foot goes for goal. |
| 0:16.7 | And then enjoy even more podcasts full of analysis and reaction to the big stories. |
| 0:21.6 | The stat that is astonishing is they ended with the lowest amount of possession. |
| 0:25.2 | And she's had to live with that. |
| 0:26.8 | So if you love sport, a passion, it's almost like a religion. |
| 0:29.7 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
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| 0:35.8 | BBC Sounds, music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:39.5 | You're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast with me, Matthew Sweet. |
| 0:43.2 | Just a sec. |
| 0:46.6 | That owl's a hard task, master. |
| 0:50.2 | Ah. |
| 0:51.7 | Ah, well, that's Unit 15. |
| 1:13.4 | Talk about the army in Vietnamese. And if you know that sound, you'll know I'm using one of those language apps, which I'm pretty convinced isn't really teaching me a language, just letting me play a game, which happens to involve foreign words. And on World Refugee Day, free thinking is about language. How it lives, how it dies, how it unites us, how it divides us, how it can be conciliatory and inflammatory, |
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