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Stephen Fry’s Planet Word: Babel
A new documentary about language, Fry’s Planet Word, began on BBC2 yesterday with an episode about linguistic origins and evolution. Its host, Stephen Fry, looked into evolutionary-linguistic concerns...
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Stephen Fry’s Planet Word: Identity
Episode 2 of Fry’s Planet Word (BBC) focuses on dialects and sociolinguistic identity. It kicks off in Yorkshire, where poet Ian McMillan demonstrates stereotypical aspects of various local accents....
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Stephen Fry’s Planet Word: epilogue
Last night the BBC broadcast the fifth and final episode of Fry’s Planet Word, its new documentary about language. At first I intended blogging about each episode, but after two (Babel and Identity) I...
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Jim’s body English
Watching a short documentary on the making of The Truman Show, I heard a phrase that made me turn on the subtitles and take a snapshot: Spoken by visual effects supervisor Michael McAlister, “body...
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Films of linguistic interest
After watching the experimental French film Themroc (1973), about a man who rejects society to become a city-dwelling caveman, I was amused to see its Wikipedia page say the language used in the film...
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The writer automaton by Pierre Jaquet-Droz
* The short clip below is from the BBC Four documentary Mechanical Marvels: Clockwork Dreams on the history of automata, narrated by Prof. Simon Schaffer. It shows a mechanical boy known as the writer,...
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English 3.0, a short film about digital language use
‘English 3.0’ is a 20-minute video (embedded below) from documentary filmmaker Joe Gilbert about the effects of digital culture on language use and change, particularly English. The introductory...
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Language acquisition and the ‘wild child’ Genie
An area of language acquisition that has attracted considerable scholarly (and lay) interest is the so-called critical period hypothesis. This proposes a critical period in childhood during which...
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