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In this episode of OffScript, Dash Arts' Artistic Director Josephine Burton is joined by Lynne Murphy, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex, author of The Prodigal Tongue, and the American voice behind the long-running blog Separated by a Common Language, for a wide-ranging and surprising conversation about the language we think we own.
Josephine and Lynne trace English from its violent beginnings, a language forged through invasion, layered with the speech of Angles, Saxons and Normans, carrying the class fault lines of its Saxon-French inheritance all the way into the present, to the extraordinary global story of a tongue that has long since outgrown its origins. They explore how migration has always remade English from below, how empire exported it across the world, and what it means that English is now spoken by more people as a second language than as a first.
They talk about language as soft power and who gets to wield it. About the difference between a language of place and a language of people. About the voraciousness of English, its restless appetite for new words, new rhythms, new speakers and why that hunger, far from diluting the language, is precisely what keeps it alive.
The conversation finds its way into Our Public House, Dash Arts' new touring theatre production, a state-of-the-nation play set in a pub, born out of three years of travelling England and listening to over 700 people talk about the country they want to live in. Because if English is a language that belongs to everyone who speaks it, then Englishness might work the same way — and that's exactly what Our Public House is asking.
Dead Language Society can be found here: www.deadlanguagesociety.com
Lynne Murphy’s blog can be found here: https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com
Our Public House is currently touring England. Find out more at https://www.dasharts.org.uk/our-public-house
This episode is part of Dash Arts' Albion series — an ongoing exploration of what it means to be English today.
Our intro music is Fakiiritanssi by Marouf Majidi
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