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Peter Trudgill

19 August 2021

The Sami people and their nine different tongues

The Sami people are divided by several different languages and thousands of kilometres of inhospitable terrain. What does it all tell us about this remotely dispersed population?

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10 August 2021

Digby Jones’ attack on Alex Scott’s accent wasn’t just snobbish, it was wrong

Why Lord Digby Jones's claims that Alex Scott's commentary ruined the Olympics are ill-founded

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27 July 2021

Where did J R R Tolkien’s surname come from?

JRR Tolkien, the South African-born philologist and author of 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord Of The Rings'. Photo by Haywood Magee/Getty Images

The roots of author J R R Tolkien’s name are almost as tangled as his fantasy fiction.

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24 July 2021

Bethlehem to Bedlam: What links bywords for peace and mayhem

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21 July 2021

The quirks of Ps and Qs

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14 July 2021

How sound switch nearly caused a farewell to alms

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02 July 2021

The language that got frozen out

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25 June 2021

Yet another way to aggravate language pedants

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20 June 2021

A common surname and its surprising roots

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12 June 2021

The fight against the homogenisation of the British Isles

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03 June 2021

It’s alright to be wrong about all right

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30 May 2021

How Singapore learned to speak with many tongues

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15 May 2021

Why the English could understand the Vikings

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15 May 2021

The slow death of Channel Islands Norman

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09 May 2021

The English language’s U-turn

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08 May 2021

Giving a v-sign to language pendants

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25 April 2021

The long and short of language

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18 April 2021

How our words turn whiffy

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10 April 2021

The slow death and recent revival of the Cornish language

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28 March 2021

Not a real language? You’ve Scot to be joking

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21 March 2021

The evolution of Joseph Stalin’s mother tongue

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14 March 2021

The language of leaping to conclusions

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06 March 2021

The season that didn’t always spring to mind

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27 February 2021

How Robert Maxwell had such a way with language

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17 February 2021

The Swiss secret that could keep Britain together

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12 February 2021

Aussie accents on the march

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31 January 2021

The vocabulary of the Vikings

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29 January 2021

The Welsh that went around the world

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23 January 2021

The words that went their own ways

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15 January 2021

How the English language slipped up when it came to spaghetti

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09 January 2021

The watery connection linking Johann Sebastian Bach and Rupert Brooke

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02 January 2021

The arrival of English in Australia… and how long after the accent appeared

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