NottinghamLingo is the one-stop shop for information and activities celebrating language in Nottingham and the region.
This website has been developed by two Nottingham languages enthusiasts Natalie Braber (Nottingham Trent University) and Nicola McLelland (University of Nottingham).
We believe that language and dialect are a crucial part of people’s identity and should be recognised as an important aspect of heritage. As a country, we should protect and promote linguistic diversity. In recent years, we’ve been working on projects which celebrate language in Nottinghamshire.
Click on the Resources menu above to discover more.
Natalie Braber
Professor of Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University
I was brought up bilingually, with English and Dutch. I learned French and German at school and studied German and Russian at university. I’m currently learning Spanish and Polish! I love finding out about the ways that different languages work.
As well as languages, I am really interested in the way that we speak – particularly our accents and dialects. A lot of my work focuses on the East Midlands, examining how language varies and studying the perception of variation within the area. We know that people are judged by the way that they speak, but it is also a really important part of our identity and heritage.
Nicola McLelland
Professor of German and History of Linguistics at the University of Nottingham.
I can’t resist learning languages – every new language is a discovery of a new world and way of thinking, and I love studying how they develop and how they work. We all speak at least one language effortlessly, and there’s no limit to how many we can learn and use – our brains are amazing!
I learned French, Latin and German at school (it was very common to take two or more languages then!). I got a degree in German and French, and lived in Bonn, Germany, for two years. I lived in Ireland for a few years, but learned much less Irish than I wanted to (definitely worth exploring, so different to English!), and I’ve also learned Italian, Japanese, Dutch, and Swedish, and Russian. At the moment I am learning Chinese.