The aim of this podcast is to capture as many different ways of doing English as possible. We talk about things that we're doing, things that we find interesting, things that we've read, things that we’ve written, things that we like, things that we've learned, things that we've researched. English is our starting point, but we bring in other languages we know about, as many as we can, as often as possible. And we never go too long without dipping into the OED to find out more about our words and their origins.
English at Leeds Trinity is made by staff and students studying English in the School of Digital and Screen Media at Leeds Trinity University.
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This is the first of two episodes which we are releasing simultaneously, celebrating the different languages of the world, of Leeds, and of students and staff at Leeds Trinity. This episode is a companion to a series of posters we’ve put up around our Horsforth campus, profiling five different languages spoken by students and staff: Akan, Romanian, Italian, Polish, and Urdu. Richard talks to Amna, a student who provided the content for our poster on Urdu, and learns about the way Urdu, Hindi and other languages are often blended in informal conversation in the UK – we also hear part of a poem in Urdu which Amna wrote for our earlier World Poetry Day poster campaign. Then we hear from Laura, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, who features on our Italian poster, and tells us about the Veneto dialect which she grew up speaking, the different contexts in which she uses Italian and English, and how she became an official ambassador of the Accademia della Crusca for the endangered word ‘Sdrucciolevole’ (listen to find out what it means!)
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22 Jul 2026
M is for . . . Multilingualism
This is the second part of our celebration of the languages of Leeds Trinity, in which we broaden the focus to think about languages of Leeds – and the world. In this episode, which we originally recorded in 2025, Richard is joined by Linda, Humaira, Oliver and Hannah. We start by sharing how many different languages between us we have some relationship with, and to put that in context we check on Ethnologue’s current estimate of the total number of living languages in the world (it’s probably more than you think). We look at what the 2021 Census revealed about the languages of Leeds – and hear about some of the topics which Humaira, Oliver and Hannah explored for their Multilingualism module. And we salute the amazing commitment to multilingualism of the West Yorkshire Police website. As the half-million Welsh speakers in the UK might say: Mwynhewch!
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15 Jun 2026
K is for . . . Kings
We’re back! And in this episode we’re indulging our love of history by thinking about kings. Especially medieval kings as represented in English literature - and not just the best-known ones but some who are often overlooked. Hannah, Edwin, Richard and Oz each introduce one king they find particularly interesting. We think about why Ethelred II is known as ‘the Unready’; why Henry III preferred feeding paupers to fighting wars; and why is King Arthur so important to us if he wasn’t even a real king? We also hear passages from Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Malory; and Edwin reads a poem from his new book, Winter Wolf, imagining the first meeting of Edward of Caernarfon (the future Edward II) with Piers Gaveston.
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10 Oct 2025
J is for . . . Jabberwocky
Hannah came up with the concept for this episode, which is all about made-up words in literature. We start by reading Lewis Carroll’s famous poem, ‘Jabberwocky’; then look at a little-known passage from Shakespeare where the characters all deliberately speak meaningless words. We think a bit about how writers such as Frank Herbert, Roald Dahl and J. K. Rowling have invented words to enrich their fictional worlds – and also about names of characters in children’s TV programmes. We end by all having a go at making up new words ourselves and speculating about how they could be used. It’s wobious!
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1 Sept 2025
My Little I
In this episode Richard is joined by students Hannah, Ben, Humaira, Saarah and Imi, who each choose one word beginning with the letter I for us to talk about. There is plenty of variety – from ‘Istanbul’ to ‘ideology’ via ‘if’ and ‘ick’ - and on the way we think about the difference between ‘incredulous’ and ‘incredible’; and also what ‘identity’ means. We end by listening to a student reading of the famous poem ‘I am’ by John Clare.
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15 Aug 2025
H is for . . . Historical Linguistics
We’re all interested in where English words came from and how the language evolved. But how can we do some research of our own into this? In this episode Richard, Ben and Hannah are joined by Dr Will Standing, who talks us through some of the digital resources which are freely available for researching the history of a language, including Google Ngrams, British National Corpus, and the EMMA corpus (which Will helped to develop). On the way we learn what the word ‘multiloquent’ means, and what an 'it-cleft' construction is, and Will and Ben share something about their historical-linguistic tattoos.
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30 Jun 2025
G is for . . . Geordie
An episode focussed on everyone’s favourite accent. Richard and Ben are joined by proud Geordies Lucy and Rod, who share their love of stottie cakes, pease pudding, and the wonders of the word ‘canny’, and give us some insights into the distinctive features of Geordie pronunciation. We also think about Geordie celebrities and the modern phenomenon of ‘Geordie stylisation’, and consider how much this version of English is changing. Howay!
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31 Mar 2025
F is for . . . First Folio
In this episode, recorded in 2024, Richard is joined by Ben, Hannah, Imi and Basil to compare notes on Shakespeare, and how we can access Shakespeare through the 1623 First Folio, the all-important book in which all Shakespeare’s plays were first printed together. We share our experiences of studying Shakespeare, and see how many of Shakespeare’s plays we can list; and we celebrate the new free online resources that give much more access to the pages of the First Folio text than we could ever get by looking at a museum copy behind glass. And on the way we discuss whether Shakespeare scholarship means Imi should now change her name . . .
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2 Nov 2024
English Week with Martyn Bedford
This is a special episode recorded with an audience of Leeds Trinity staff and students as part of our English Week in 2023. Martyn Bedford, who is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity, talks about his career as a novelist and answers questions from the audience about two memorable extracts from his novels (read by Lana and Motiba): the 'Birdmen' scene from The Island of Lost Souls (2006) and the tightrope walk scene from Twenty Questions for Gloria (2016).
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7 Aug 2024
E is for . . . Eurovision 2024
Continuing our exploration of the languages of Eurovision, Richard Yvonne and Linda celebrate the victory of Switzerland in Eurovision 2024 by hearing more from Linda about the four official languages of Switzerland and how they are used. Richard and Yvonne compare notes on some of the other interesting languages that featured alongside English in the contest; Yvonne and Linda take a quiz on ‘the poetry of Eurovision’; and we swap ideas on what the United Kingdom should do in order to get a better result next time.
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10 May 2024
E is for . . . Eurovision 2023
English at Leeds Trinity is who we are, but we are always interested in other languages beside English. In this episode Richard, Yvonne, Eloise and Maia celebrate the multilingualism of the Eurovision song contest, with a particular focus on two other languages beginning with E. We hear from Maia about her first language, Eesti Keel (Estonian); and from Yvonne about hers, Español (Spanish). We also revisit the literary question that got so much attention at Eurovision 2023: ‘Who the hell is Edgar?’ The answer was Edgar Allen Poe, the American author – and we find time to read his poem ‘Eldorado’. Note: we recorded this episode not long after Eurovision 2023. We will be following it up with another episode as soon as we can after Eurovision 2024.
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10 May 2024
D is for . . . Dialect
Join Richard, Eloise and Ben in this episode for an exploration of the ever-popular topic of dialect. We test Eloise on her knowledge of Salford dialect; revisit the question of whether there is more than one way to pronounce the word ‘apricot’; examine what Yorkshire dialect looked like in 1683; and see if we can guess the meaning of some Leeds dialect words from 1862. Note: we originally recorded this episode in 2023, so keep listening to the end for an update on what we discovered when we revisited the OED in 2024.
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10 May 2024
C is for . . . Creative Writing (Part 2)
In Part 2 of our C is for . . . Creative Writing episode, Amina, Oz and Lucy talk about what it is like to teach and study creative writing at university; and we then all share in reading and discussing a piece of creative writing which was recently produced for a unique occasion: poet laureate Simon Armitage’s poem ‘An Unexpected Guest’ which was written to mark the coronation of King Charles III in May 2023. Note: we originally recorded these episodes in 2023, so keep listening to the end for a postscript we have added in 2024.
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10 May 2024
C is for . . . Creative Writing (Part 1)
Creative Writing is a big deal at Leeds Trinity. In Part 1 of our C is for . . . Creative Writing episode, Amina, Oz and Lucy join Richard and Yvonne to talk about creative writing; what it means to them and how they got into it; and each read a short piece that they have recently written.
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5 Oct 2023
B is for . . . Book
Eloise, Yvonne and Ruqaiya join Richard to talk about favourite books, words for ‘book’, and one book in particular that we have enjoyed reading recently, R.F. Kuang’s Babel, a novel that does amazing things with ideas about translation and what gets lost in translation. We end by dipping into our knowledge of other languages to come up with some suggestions of our own for untranslatable words which could be used by the fictional linguists in Babel.
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5 Oct 2023
Give Me An AE
In this episode, Richard is joined by Brogan and Hannah for an excursion into Old English. We use some of the online dictionaries available to research the Old English equivalents of modern words; have a go at solving an Anglo-Saxon riddle from the Exeter Book; and read the famous poem 'Wulf and Eadwacer' - in the original and in a translation made by Leeds Trinity students.
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10 Aug 2023
Give Me An A
In this episode Richard, Yvonne and Eloise think about a selection of words beginning with A, compare accents, talk about Jane Austen, and read an American poem.
English at Leeds Trinity is a podcast made by staff and students studying English in the School of Digital and Screen Media at Leeds Trinity University.
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