Left-Field Languages

Stuart celebrates music and poetry written in obscure languages with a selection of guests in front of a live audience at the UK’s biggest poetry and performance festival, Contains Strong Language festival in Hull.

Featuring music with lyrics in minority (and some made-up) languages, Stuart also welcomes the writer and linguist Adham Smart to talk about Esperanto. Esperanto was created in 1887 by a Polish-Jewish doctor who believed that a new, easy to learn auxiliary language would enable global discussions to take place and help bring peace to the world.

British-Ghanian poet Victoria Adukwei Bulley talks about her project Mother Tongues where she invited British poets of colour to ask their mothers to translate a poem into their mother's native language. The resulting series of films showed the poets having a conversation about culture and language with the women who’ve nurtured them before reading out a translation of their daughter’s poem.