Multilingualism is not a Curse part 2

Why is it that despite all of the evidence that using multiple languages is good for you, multilingualism is still sometimes treated with suspicion? In this episode, I examine the concept of verbal hygiene, and how the policing of linguistic borders affects our lives.

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The contributors:

* Agnieszka Wodzińska is a writer. She has a zine about the experience of moving to Scotland, which is out now and available on Etsy. It’s called ‘One Of The Good Ones’. Her essay ‘When The Curtain Falls’ is going to be featured in the anthology The Bi-ble volume II: New Testimonials, which will be published by Monstrous Regiment in the summer. It’s about growing up queer in Poland.

* Alison Phipps is Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies at the University of Glasgow, and the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts. She is also co-convenor of GRAMNET, the Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network. Her book ‘Decolonising Multilingualism’ will be published by Multilingual Matters in June 2019. If you would like to read more about her ideas on multilingualism before June, a good place to start is here. She also recently released a book of poetry written with Zimbabwean writer Tawona Sitholé, which you can find here. You can follow her on Twitter here.

* Eva Hanna is a PhD student who studies multilingualism. She is also the parent of two multilingual children. She also has a couple of excellent blog posts about the value of multilingualism which you can read here and here.

* Natalie Findlayson stopped speaking German as a kid, but once she’d left school she ended up studying it at uni, spending some time in Germany and becoming completely fluent. Her parents might have felt at the time like they hadn’t succeeded in raising a bilingual kid but, ultimately, in a roundabout way, they did. She now teaches German and French at the University of Glasgow.

* Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney and based in Edinburgh. Their poetry collections Tonguit (2015) and The Games (2018) were both shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, and Tonguit for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Harry Josephine was the 2009 BBC Scotland slam champion, founded Inky Fingers Spoken Word, and co-directs the performance platform Anatomy. Their participatory theatre has toured widely, including Forest Fringe (UK), NTI (Latvia), CrisisArt (Italy) and Teszt (Romania). Harry Josephine’s performance What We Owe was picked by the Guardian's best-of-the-Fringe 2013 roundup – in the “But Is It Art?” category.

* Andrew Macdonell lives in Brussels and tells people how to apply for research funding from the EU.

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The song at the end is ‘There Is No Ending’ by Arab Strap, used with permission from Aidan Moffat.

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Thanks to everyone I spoke to while making this series, including the many people I spoke to whose interviews haven’t yet appeared: Andreas Wolff, Peter McCune, Oisín Kealy, Jamie Liddell, Stacey Keen, Sean Sweeney, Colin Reilly, Karen Corrigan, Bruce Eunson, Claire Needler, Derrick McClure, E Jamieson, Karen Lowing, Laura Green, Michael Hance, Pavel Iosad, Robert McColl Miller, Ben Kinsella, Flora and Morgan Livingstone, the good people of The Bold Collective, and Kamil from Polska Skola. Even if your voices don’t appear, your ideas and influence do – and I hope to include your actual voices at a later date!

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