
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


This year's Reith Lecturer is Jean Aitchison, a Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.
In her first lecture, Professor Aitchison asks: Is our language sick? She explores what troubles us most about the way in which our language is changing, who is responsible, and what rules are being discarded. She considers why many of these rules were artificially constructed in the first place and argues that we need to understand language, not try to control it. Informal speech is not intrinsically worse than formal speech, she says, but different, and that the ever-shifting nature of language, is what keeps it flexible.
By BBC Radio 44.8
1616 ratings
This year's Reith Lecturer is Jean Aitchison, a Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.
In her first lecture, Professor Aitchison asks: Is our language sick? She explores what troubles us most about the way in which our language is changing, who is responsible, and what rules are being discarded. She considers why many of these rules were artificially constructed in the first place and argues that we need to understand language, not try to control it. Informal speech is not intrinsically worse than formal speech, she says, but different, and that the ever-shifting nature of language, is what keeps it flexible.

7,873 Listeners

1,111 Listeners

371 Listeners

891 Listeners

1,077 Listeners

184 Listeners

5,513 Listeners

1,804 Listeners

1,881 Listeners

1,058 Listeners

1,995 Listeners

152 Listeners

3,215 Listeners

1,040 Listeners

15,916 Listeners