Alex Rawling. Photo courtesy of Black Line Productions.
Come with us for a jaunt into the fertile, fascinating and frequently funny world of languages, how they affect and indeed define the world we live in.
To get a proper view on this, we spoke with Alex Rawlings, a British language education ambassador and twice published author (How To Speak Any Language Fluently and From Amourette to Żal: Bizarre and Beautiful Words from around Europe) who was crowned the UK’s most multilingual student in 2012. He won that accolade by being able to speak a remarkable 15 languages: yes, putting those of us struggling to pick up just Spanish alone to shame.
Over coffee in a café on Passeig de Gràcia, Alex told us about how he developed the language bug, some of his formative years learning new tongues, his views on how to pick up a new language faster, and a whole lot else besides. We learned loads of things about idioms, dialects, lost languages and new ones coming up, as well as his thoughts on why the hegemony of English might not be so dominant forever.
It was a pleasure chatting with Alex and learning some new things about language, and we hope that you enjoy it too.
The music on this episode is “No Frills Cumbia” by Kevin MacLeod from https://filmmusic.io License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Harry Stott.
Harry Stott is a regular contributor to the Barcelona Metropolitan covering Brexit, local political and social issues as well as the music scene. He recently received a B.A. in music from the University of Leeds, and now writes and produces radio content for a number of organizations in Barcelona and beyond. You can read more of Harry's articles here.