Before our usual blog kicks off today, please note this special announcement: as a result of the developing Covid-19 situation, we regret that we have had to cancel the Modern Languages Open Day which had been scheduled for Saturday 2 May. Please keep an eye on our ‘meet us‘ pages for details of open days later in the year.

Now, where were we?… We’re on a roll with the podcasting as this week we check back in with the Linguamania podcast, produced by Creative Multilingualism. In the second episode of this fascinating series, the speakers focus on the topic ‘Understanding our Natural World: why languages matter’. Here’s the podcast…

This podcast draws on the research of Felice Wyndham, Karen Park, and Andrew Gosler, who are academics in Strand 2 (‘Naming’) of the programme. This strand is themed around ‘Creating a Meaningful World: Nature in Name, Metaphor and Myth ‘. They examine the creativity at work as people across diverse language backgrounds respond to the natural world through naming, metaphor, and myth. This includes questions like:

• Are words influenced by local environments?
• How do we explain similarities and differences between linguistic diversity and biodiversity?
• What do different approaches to naming reveal about the role and mechanisms of creativity in language?

Birds provide the natural lens through which this research is pursued: the migrations of barn swallows link a multitude of different languages; owls bear an otherworldly salience acknowledged across cultures; and each community boasts those birds unique to place that hold special significance.