Welcome to VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.
This month, VoiceMap’s founder Iain Manley explains why we have a new logo and the new tagline ‘curiously human audio tours’ in this Reel.
We explore how dying languages – and the loss by the end of this century of half of the world’s seven thousand languages – are a potent illustration of the ways words and culture connect. We also travel to Andalucia, where sherry-swilling mice won over a bodega’s workers.
But first, we have new tours by Sir Stephen Fry and History Hit’s Dan Snow to announce.
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For your sense of the curiously human | LONDON RACONTEURS
This week, both the inimitable Sir Stephen Fry and History Hit’s Dan Snow joined VoiceMap’s community of more than 800 publishers.
Fry reunited with the QI Elves – the researchers behind the BBC panel show he presented for years – to produce two tours, one through Westminster and one through the City and Bankside. The details they surface are perfectly QI: a skyscraper that accidentally melted a car in 2014, a medieval Bishop of Winchester who owned the Bankside brothels, the Japanese tattoo artist who left his mark on both George V and Czar Nicholas II.
Snow, whose History Hit network produces some of the world’s most popular history podcasts, has created a tour that shows us how the Great Fire of London gave shape to the city we know today. St Paul’s Cathedral, the brick and stone buildings that replaced timber, and Leadenhall Market’s current Victorian structure were all built on fire-cleared land.
History Hit has also released two other London tours – The Execution of Charles I with Dan Snow and The Rise and Fall of Roman London with Tristan Hughes – along with Richard III’s Leicester with Matt Lewis. More are launching further afield later this year.
In the city that’s given us raconteurs from Dickens and Pepys to Wilde and Johnson – whose “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” never seems to age – Fry and Snow are in good company. But, in our era of algorithmic recommendations, these are more than just celebrity audio tours. They’re a vote for the fact that the most compelling way to explore a place is still with the guidance of someone who genuinely knows and cares about it.
🔗 Listen to the first three locations from QI or History Hit’s new tours – Stephen Fry’s Quite Interesting Tour of Westminster, Stephen Fry’s Quite Interesting Tour of the City and Bankside, The Great Fire of London with Dan Snow, The Execution of Charles I with Dan Snow, The Rise and Fall of Roman London with Tristan Hughes, Richard III’s Leicester with Matt Lewis – and watch Iain Manley’s Reel.
For your sense of inheritance | HOW TO KILL A LANGUAGE
The new book How to Kill a Language paints a vivid picture of “linguicide”: the overt and covert suppression of languages, to the point of extinction. The loss of a mother tongue from one generation to the next is part of author Sophia Smith Galer’s story, too.
When her 93-year-old grandmother died, Smith Galer began to grieve too for a language from the mountains in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna that she now knew to be endangered. She’d grown up hearing her Nonna speak Emilian – but, somehow, had never mastered it.
In one of several very watchable short videos and Reels, Smith Galer introduces the book that the Financial Times has called “moving, beautiful and important.”
“As a granddaughter, I’ve written a book in which I hope to show you the emotions at the heart of language loss and what is an aggressive collapse of linguistic diversity around the world. But as a journalist, I knew I had to tell you the full story, not only about what has happened to languages like Emilian in Italy, but what is happening to languages around the world today.”
It’s a poignant window onto a much larger reckoning. By the end of this century, half of the world’s seven thousand languages could be gone, taking with them centuries of knowledge that has no translation, she warns.
As someone who called China home for almost five years, my mind turned immediately to the Chinese Communist Party’s attack on Tibetan and Uyghur languages. But there are also more subtle forces that put “this world [that] glitters with language diversity” at risk: nationalism, migration, the global internet, and “immigrants being told their languages are a problem, not a resource.”
Smith Galer travels from Ghana to Kurdistan, and Ecuador to Oman to show us the human side of this story, writing:
“We understand that language is one of the ways that we pass our identity and heritage down to our children, and yet many families seemingly let go of their heritage languages, perhaps by what they feel is choice or necessity.”
It’s not all loss and despair. The book also charts a series of solutions for reclaiming and revitalising these disappearing worlds – before it’s too late. And, each of us, she promises, can play a role.
🔗 Read an excerpt of How to Kill a Language (including an audio sample), and dive into some of Smith Galer’s thought-provoking short videos like Why don’t we all just speak English? on YouTube or Instagram. Here’s the US version (out 7 July).
For your sense of intoxication | JEREZ’S MICE KNOW HOW TO LIVE
The Spanish know how to live. This was a phrase that kept ringing in my ears when I was considering relocating to Spain a couple of years ago. It would most often come to me when watching people in some or other public square, where children played as midnight approached. The steamy Sevilla air held you in its embrace – and a drink and a tapa were never far away.
One of the cities I scoped out was Jerez de la Frontera, the home of sherry. This Reel is a snapshot from a bodega in 1986 Jerez, when thousands of casks of maturing sherry were being “threatened by a colony of hungry and troublesome mice.”
Did the owners bring in a cat? Poison them? No. The workers built little ladders so the mice could more easily sip from the glasses of sherry that were served – with a tapa, naturally. Problem solved.
🔗 Watch the delightful Reel here.
Until next time, thanks for travelling with us!
Best Wishes,
Claire van den Heever
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