Moderated by:
John Worne – CEO of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, the UK’s Royal Charter body for language professionals. The CIOL works to enhance the recognition and promote the value of languages and language skills. Prior to CIOL John spent five year in Higher Education at the Royal College of Art and King’s College London and eight years promoting languages and culture at the British Council. Before that he worked at heart of UK Government in the Cabinet Office and Department of Health. John spent the 1990s working internationally, in marketing and business development, including five years living and working in Paris. John speaks French, is progressing in Italian and is a graduate in Philosophy, Politics & Economics from the University of Oxford.
On the panel:
Casper Grathwohl – President of Oxford Languages and the Academic Product Director at Oxford University Press. Over the past 20 years, Casper has been instrumental in the digital transformation of Oxford’s academic and languages publishing programs, overseeing the development of landmark scholarly digital projects such as Oxford Global Languages and Oxford Bibliographies Online. Most recently he has lead the transformation of Oxford’s dictionary program from a publisher of print dictionaries into one of the premier language data suppliers in the world, partnering with global tech companies such as Apple and Google to build out digital resources in under-represented languages. Casper holds a bachelor’s Degree in Classical Languages from Kalamazoo College and a MBA from the Stern School of Business at New York University.
Dr Kathrin Kunkel-Razum – Editor-in-chief of The Duden Dictionary, the dictionary of the German Language.
Professor Aditi Lahiri CBE, FBA, MAE – Professor of Linguistics and the Director of the Language and Brain Laboratory at the University of Oxford since 2007. Currently she is also the Vice President (Humanities) of the British Academy. She has doctorates from the University of Calcutta and Brown University and her first teaching positions were at the University of California, Los Angeles and Santa Cruz. After seven years as a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, she held the Chair of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, Germany for 15 years. Her research programme makes use of a varied range of methodologies, from brain imaging technology to palaeographic investigation of old manuscripts, with the overarching theme of investigating the mental representation and historical development of the sounds of human language. Her current research has been funded by grants from the ERC and UKRI.
Tony Thorne – Language Consultant at King’s College London, and former Director of the Language Centre. Tony records and writes about contemporary slang, the language of subcultures, particularly of young people – and other varieties of new language including political jargon, media catchphrases and ‘lifestyle’ terms. He has written, broadcast and lectured on these topics extensively in the UK and worldwide, most recently recording and analysing the language of Brexit and populism and of the COVID pandemic, also commenting in the media on racist language and on the misuse of language by politicians and celebrities. He previously wrote the ‘Last Word’ column in the Sunday Express newspaper and the ‘Yoofspeak’ column in the Times Educational Supplement. Tony is the compiler of the four successive editions of Bloomsbury’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, and wrote The 100 Words That Make the English, a collection of cultural keywords, Fads, Fashions & Cults, the Dictionary of Popular Culture and Shoot the Puppy, a collection of buzzwords and jargon published by Penguin, as well as cultural histories and textbooks. He has contributed to many specialist and learners’ dictionaries and to encyclopaedias of language and linguistics.