Fry's Planet Word

Focusing on the origins of language with topics covered including:

• The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and communication between primates
• The Turkana language
• The FOXP2 gene and its effect on language
• Brain patterns from an MRI scan while talking
• Victor of Aveyron, feral children, and language acquisition (discussion with psycholinguist Steven Pinker)
• The wug test by Jean Berko Gleason
• The Klingon language and how d'Armond Speers taught it as the first language to his son
• Sign language
• The Tower of Babel
• Philology, the Proto-Indo-European language, and Grimm's law
• Working languages and official languages of the United Nations

Focusing on how one identifies through language

• Regional accents of English through Yorkshire and Newcastle upon Tyne (discussion with poet Ian McMillan)
• Multilingualism
• Jewish humour and the Yiddish language (Discussion with comedians Ari Teman and Stewie Stone at The Friar's Club)
• Language death and globalisation
• Irish language and the Connacht Irish dialect on Ros na Rún
• Basque language and cuisine
• The loss of the Occitan language and its Provençal dialect
• The Académie française and inventing new French words
• The Maghreb French dialect's effect on standard French
• Israel and the revival of the Hebrew language as a modern language (discussion with linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann)
• Kenya's Turkana people and the use of English, Swahili, and Turkana

The evolution of slang and profanity

• Common sources of obscenities in the Turkana and English languages
• "Fuck", Tourette syndrome, and coprolalia
• Swearing and the basal ganglia
• Brian Blessed, the Stroop effect, and the hypoalgesic effect of swearing
• The Thick of It and Armando Iannucci
• The ban of Lady Chatterley's Lover
• Stephen K. Amos and racial and sexual epithets
• Euphemisms and weasel words
• Omid Djalili and the Persian politeness of taarof
• Euphemism and dysphemism in the hospital
• Polari in Round the Horne
• Teenagers and slang at Berkeley High School
• Hip hop and popular media on the growth of language
• El Général and the Tunisian revolution

The history of written language, from the earliest writing to blogging and tweeting

• The Akha people of Thailand who have no written language
• Cuneiform, the history of bureaucracy, and the Epic of Gilgamesh
• Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Rosetta Stone
• Classical Greece, Homer, the Phoenicians, and the alphabet
• Jerusalem, the Western Wall, and the resilience of Judaism by means of the Hebrew alphabet
• The Dome of the Rock and the spread of the Arabic script with Islam
• The Dead Sea Scrolls and the oldest record of the Ten Commandments
• Printing and its roots in China
• The complexities of Written Chinese with David Tang and Johnson Chang
• The development of pinyin during the Cultural Revolution
• Typography, the development of the book, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the standardisation of the English language
• The democratisation of reading, the Age of Enlightenment, and Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie
• The Bodleian Library and the digitisation of information
• Jimmy Wales and the Wikipedia project
• Social media and the Arab Spring
• Belle de Jour and the lure of blogging
• Hanif Kureishi and the evolution of the book, Robert Coover and electronic literature, and the researchers at the MIT Media Lab

The influence of storytelling and literature on language

• The Turkana people and their rivalry with the Toposa people
• Plot with William Goldman and his Marathon Man
• Homer's Odyssey and Iliad
• James Joyce's Ulysses with David Norris
• J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and the works of Stephen King with Peter Jackson
• William Shakespeare and the emphasis on character
• Hamlet with Simon Russell Beale, David Tennant, Brian Blessed, and Mark Rylance
• Shakespeare in French with Guillaume Gallienne of the Comédie-Française and in Mandarin Chinese with David Tang and Johnson Chang
• P. G. Wodehouse with Robert McCrum
• George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, its Newspeak, and business speak with Ian Hislop
• W. H. Auden's "Funeral Blues", Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Coldplay's "Fix You" with Richard Curtis
• Bob Dylan's music with Christopher Ricks