Students from Parkside Community College in Cambridge have been sharing with the MEITS team their views on the value of multilingualism and how speaking more than one language at home can add to a greater understanding of cultural diversity.

On 17-25 November 2017, Belfast, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Nottingham hosted photo exhibitions on the theme of Understanding our Multilingual World as part of the Being Human Festival. At the Cambridge exhibition we interviewed three of the photographers: Yamanda Akroune (image), Nora Mustun (image) and Joyce Kim (image).

In this podcast Wendy Ayres-Bennett talks to Baroness Jean Coussins, Co-Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages, about the need for a national languages policy and a more holistic approach towards languages in the UK.

On 6th and 7th July, Strand 2 of the MEITS project played host to a workshop organised by strand lead Nicola McLelland at the University of Nottingham. There are further details about the workshop and a report here. These two podcasts were also recorded during the workshop:

1. What’s correct Ukrainian in the UK?

Nottingham PhD student Katie Harrison interviews community Ukrainian teacher Lina Maksymuk about the challenges of teaching Ukrainian in the UK, in a community where not everyone agrees what correct Ukrainian is.

2. What’s good and bad about the language(s) we use - and who even cares about correctness anyway?

Nicola McLelland (Nottingham) leads a discussion with Jing Huang (Reading), Jonathan Kasstan (Queen Mary University of London) and Noel Ó Murchada (Trinity College Dublin) about who decides what’s right or wrong in how we use our language(s), who it matters to, and what people do to attempt to control what we say and how.

In this podcast, participants at the recent conference on the Emergence of Standard English in Multilingual Britain discuss the long history of multilingualism in the UK and the slow emergence of standard English.