New Thinking: The impact of being multilingual
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2020
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How German argument differs from English, the links between Arabic and Chinese and different versions of The 1001 Nights to the use of slang and multiple languages in the work of young performers and writers in the West Midlands: John Gallagher looks at a series of research projects at different UK universities which are exploring the impact and benefits of multilingualism.
Katrin Kohl is Professor of German Literature and a Fellow of Jesus College. She runs the Creative Multilingualism project. https://www.creativeml.ox.ac.uk/about/people/katrin-kohl https://www.creativeml.ox.ac.uk/creative-multilingualism-manifesto
Wen-chin Ouyang is a professor of Arabic literature and comparative literature at SOAS, University of London. Her books include editing an edition for Everyman's Library called The Arabian Nights: An Anthology and Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel: Nation-State, Modernity and Tradition. You can hear more from Wen-chin in this Free Thinking discussion of The One Thousand and One Nights https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b052gz7g
Rajinder Dudrah is Professor of Cultural Studies & Creative Industries at Birmingham City University. His books include the co-edited South Asian Creative and Cultural Industries (Dudrah, R. & Malik, K. 2020) and Graphic Novels and Visual Cultures in South Asia (Dudrah, R. & Dawson Varughese, E. 2020).
Saturday, 26 September is the European Day of Languages 2020 and Wednesday, 30 September is International Translation Day 2020 which English PEN is marking with a programme of online events https://www.englishpen.org/posts/events/international-translation-day-2020/
You might also be interested in this Free Thinking conversation about language and belonging featuring Preti Taneja with Guy Gunaratne, Dina Nayeri, Michael Rosen, Momtaza Mehri and Deena Mohamed. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07fvbhn
Here is a Free Thinking episode that looks at the language journey of the 29 London bus https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00014qk Steven Pinker and Will Self explore Language in this episode of Free Thinking https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04hysms Arundhati Roy talks about translation and Professor Nicola McLelland and Vicky Gough of the British Council look at language learning in schools https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b5hk01
This episode of Free Thinking is put together in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI as one of a series of discussions focusing on new academic research also available to download as New Thinking episodes on the BBC Arts & Ideas podcast feed. You can find the whole collection here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90
Producer: Karl Bos
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | I'm John Gallowher, and on today's episode in the New Thinking Strand of the Arts and Ideas podcast, we're talking about multilingualism. |
| 0:40.6 | Hello. |
| 0:41.6 | Saturday the 26th of September is European Day of Languages. |
| 0:46.2 | And to celebrate it, we've brought together three marvellously multilingual guests to get us thinking creatively about the words we use. |
| 0:56.5 | My guests have argued that we all have what they call language lives, made up of the languages of our past and our present, |
| 1:02.8 | the languages that shape who we are today. As someone who was raised in English but educated |
| 1:07.8 | through Irish, and who's learned a language or two in his time, |
| 1:16.4 | this was an idea that fascinated me. So I wanted to start by asking each of my guests to give a quick run-through of their own language life. First, we have Katrin Kohl, Professor of German Literature |
| 1:23.1 | at the University of Oxford. Katrin, tell us a little about your language life. |
| 1:34.3 | So I grew up in Germany and with an English mother and a German father. The early years of my life were very much binary and actually my life continued along those lines, speaking German |
| 1:40.6 | and English and working with both German and English. |
| 1:47.5 | And it was only really this project creative multilingualism that started to make me think about languages in a very different way. |
| 1:51.8 | So while I'm a tutor in modern languages, |
| 1:54.9 | I've never really seen myself as being particularly successful at learning languages. |
| 1:59.1 | I've spent some time in Spain. |
| 2:00.8 | I learned French at school. I did some Latin. Dabbled a bit at learning languages. I've spent some time in Spain. |
| 2:02.0 | I learned French at school. |
| 2:03.0 | I did some Latin. |
| 2:05.3 | Dabbled a bit in other languages, |
... |
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