English at Leeds Trinity Podcast

This is the first of two episodes which we are releasing simultaneously, celebrating the different languages of the world, of Leeds, and of students and staff at Leeds Trinity. This episode is a companion to a series of posters we’ve put up around our Horsforth campus, profiling five different languages spoken by students and staff: Akan, Romanian, Italian, Polish, and Urdu. Richard talks to Amna, a student who provided the content for our poster on Urdu, and learns about the way Urdu, Hindi and other languages are often blended in informal conversation in the UK – we also hear part of a poem in Urdu which Amna wrote for our earlier World Poetry Day poster campaign. Then we hear from Laura, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, who features on our Italian poster, and tells us about the Veneto dialect which she grew up speaking, the different contexts in which she uses Italian and English, and how she became an official ambassador of the Accademia della Crusca for the endangered word ‘Sdrucciolevole’ (listen to find out what it means!)  

This is the second part of our celebration of the languages of Leeds Trinity, in which we broaden the focus to think about languages of Leeds – and the world. In this episode, which we originally recorded in 2025, Richard is joined by Linda, Humaira, Oliver and Hannah. We start by sharing how many different languages between us we have some relationship with, and to put that in context we check on Ethnologue’s current estimate of the total number of living languages in the world (it’s probably more than you think). We look at what the 2021 Census revealed about the languages of Leeds – and hear about some of the topics which Humaira, Oliver and Hannah explored for their Multilingualism module. And we salute the amazing commitment to multilingualism of the West Yorkshire Police website. As the half-million Welsh speakers in the UK might say: Mwynhewch! 

We’re back! And in this episode we’re indulging our love of history by thinking about kings. Especially medieval kings as represented in English literature - and not just the best-known ones but some who are often overlooked. Hannah, Edwin, Richard and Oz each introduce one king they find particularly interesting. We think about why Ethelred II is known as ‘the Unready’; why Henry III preferred feeding paupers to fighting wars; and why is King Arthur so important to us if he wasn’t even a real king? We also hear passages from Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Malory; and Edwin reads a poem from his new book, Winter Wolf, imagining the first meeting of Edward of Caernarfon (the future Edward II) with Piers Gaveston.   

Hannah came up with the concept for this episode, which is all about made-up words in literature. We start by reading Lewis Carroll’s famous poem, ‘Jabberwocky’; then look at a little-known passage from Shakespeare where the characters all deliberately speak meaningless words. We think a bit about how writers such as Frank Herbert, Roald Dahl and J. K. Rowling have invented words to enrich their fictional worlds – and also about names of characters in children’s TV programmes. We end by all having a go at making up new words ourselves and speculating about how they could be used. It’s wobious!   

In this episode Richard is joined by students Hannah, Ben, Humaira, Saarah and Imi, who each choose one word beginning with the letter I for us to talk about. There is plenty of variety – from ‘Istanbul’ to ‘ideology’ via ‘if’ and ‘ick’ - and on the way we think about the difference between ‘incredulous’ and ‘incredible’; and also what ‘identity’ means. We end by listening to a student reading of the famous poem ‘I am’ by John Clare.    

An episode focussed on everyone’s favourite accent. Richard and Ben are joined by proud Geordies Lucy and Rod, who share their love of stottie cakes, pease pudding, and the wonders of the word ‘canny’, and give us some insights into the distinctive features of Geordie pronunciation. We also think about Geordie celebrities and the modern phenomenon of ‘Geordie stylisation’, and consider how much this version of English is changing. Howay!

In this episode, recorded in 2024, Richard is joined by Ben, Hannah, Imi and Basil to compare notes on Shakespeare, and how we can access Shakespeare through the 1623 First Folio, the all-important book in which all Shakespeare’s plays were first printed together. We share our experiences of studying Shakespeare, and see how many of Shakespeare’s plays we can list; and we celebrate the new free online resources that give much more access to the pages of the First Folio text than we could ever get by looking at a museum copy behind glass. And on the way we discuss whether Shakespeare scholarship means Imi should now change her name . . . 

This is a special episode recorded with an audience of Leeds Trinity staff and students as part of our English Week in 2023. Martyn Bedford, who is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity, talks about his career as a novelist and answers questions from the audience about two memorable extracts from his novels (read by Lana and Motiba): the 'Birdmen' scene from The Island of Lost Souls (2006) and the tightrope walk scene from Twenty Questions for Gloria (2016).