Snotty Gogs and Moggie Nightgown may not immediately mean a lot to you but as common or folk names for the Yew berry and Wood anemone they reveal a fascinating social and cultural history of the countryside. Michael Rosen talks to the natural history broadcaster Brett Westwood about the informative, often funny sometimes bawdy names given to British plants and flowers.

Producer: Maggie Ayre

Michael Rosen asks William Laven about how he has learnt to embrace language and life with a stammer.

For the first 10 years of his life, William Laven went to speech therapy with a stammer that was so severe he could not form a full sentence. Fast forward to today, William is now a 23-year-old podcast founder, Tedx speaker, stammer advocate, awareness raiser and campaigner. He is devoted to improving expectations for those with speech impediments, to challenge the stigma surrounding stammers, and to encourage children with stammers to believe in themselves.

When it comes to his own stammer, he now believes it’s his superpower!

Produced for BBC Audio Bristol by Becky Ripley

Acclaimed Australian linguist Professor Nick Enfield has come to the conclusion that language is good for lawyers, for the purposes of persuasion, but bad for scientists who seek to accurately represent reality. It's a fascinating idea he explores in his new book Language vs Reality. What can language describe and where does it fail? Presenter Michael Rosen explores this with him in an in-depth conversation.

Nathan talks with Michael about words we use when talking about mental health.

Producer Sally Heaven

It's Gone Dark Over Bill's Mother's

In Britain talking about the weather is a good neutral way to start conversation. Because we have such varying weather conditions (three seasons in one day) there is always something to marvel at or grumble about. But around the world sayings and descriptive words for clouds, winds, rainfall and dry spells are also popular. Michael Rosen is joined by lexicographer, Harry Campbell, who compiled a Compendium of Weather to discuss the various ways we like to talk about it from the North East of Scotland to the South West of England via Wales and Northern Ireland. Snel winds, dreich days and nesh climates all feature along with some of the hundreds of contributions sent in by listeners from around Britain.

Producer for BBC audio in Bristol, Maggie Ayre

Adoptive parent Margaret Reynolds talks about the language used around children in care. From the unthinking people asking about 'real parents' to the clinical language used to describe children's lives.

Producer for BBC Audio in Bristol, Sally Heaven

Dr Jamila Lyiscott describes to Michael Rosen the 3 ways in which she speaks English according to whether she's at home, at school or with friends. Her TED talk on the subject is one of the most-viewed language performances on the internet and is used in education. She self-describes as a trilingual orator and asks: who decides who is articulate?

Produced by Beth O'Dea for BBC Audio Bristol

Are you a lover of SF and all things fantasy, or merely a fan?

Jesse Sheidlower formerly of the Oxford English Dictionary began compiling a dictionary of sci-fi 20 years ago and has been updating it ever since. He brings Michael Rosen up to speed with current parlance in the SF world (true fans prefer this term rather than sci-fi) and explores the origins of words and sayings to do with robotics, extraterrestrial life and space exploration.

Producer: Maggie Ayre

Will machine translation ever be as good as human translation? How do services like Google Translate actually work? How does Alexa or Siri know what I'm saying? And will I ever be able to have a true conversation with my virtual assistant? Michael Rosen explores new developments in speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis with journalist and author Lane Greene.

Lane Greene is the language columnist and Spain correspondent at The Economist. He’s the author of two books about language: 'Talk on the Wild Side' and 'You Are What you Speak'.

Produced by Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio in Bristol

Michael Rosen is joined by John McWhorter, author and linguist at Columbia University, to talk about his life in language.

John H. McWhorter teaches linguistics, American Studies, and music history at Columbia University. He is a contributing editor at the Atlantic, columnist at the New York Times and host of Slate’s Lexicon Valley podcast. McWhorter is the author of twenty books often on the subject of language, including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Talking Back Talking Black, Words On The Move and Woke Racism.

Producer: Eliza Lomas