It's Eurovision season! We love to talk about what we can learn about language from this international song contest, but even we didn't realise that there was so much to learn. Language choice, language policy, language and gender and metaphor — and all of this has been packed into a unit at Umeå University: Linguistics and the Eurovision Song Contest. Paulette van der Voet and Solveig Bollig are heading up the course, and they're here to tell us all about it… and nerd out with Hedvig besides.

Timestamps

• Cold open: 0:00
• Intros: 0:39
• News: 7:39
• Related or Not: 26:41
• Interview with Paulette and Solveig: 38:53
• Words of the Week: 1:30:08
• Comment from John: 1:49:18
• The Reads: 1:53:53
• Outtakes: 2:02:25