Language
Arts & Ideas20 Jun 2025

Language

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

Episoder(2000)

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Oral tradition and oracy

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Taste

Taste

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Women, language & experience

Women, language & experience

In a special programme looking ahead to International Women’s Day on March 8th, Shahidha Bari looks at how women express themselves in language, argument, poetry and art. Her guests include:Sara Ahmed...

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Authority

Authority

Is authority a justly unfashionable quality that we should consign to the past? Or does it still have a place in political and business leadership, schools, medical settings and in the home? What is t...

27 Feb 57min

Crime and punishment medieval to modern

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Working Class Creativity

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From an impoverished neighbourhood in South London, Charlie Chaplin became one of the most significant figures in the development of cinema. More recently, TV writers like Sophie Willan and Michaela C...

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