Are little deers jumping in your heart? (And other multilingual metaphors)

During Oxford's Curiosity Carnival, a citywide celebration and sharing of research, the Creative Multilingualism team set out to collect as many multilingual body part metaphors as possible.

With the help of two mannequins, we asked visitors to Curiosity Carnival to write down any body part metaphors or idioms they could think of, in any language they knew, and then stick them on the relevant part of the mannequins. Oxford once again proved to be teeming with linguistic diversity and we gathered metaphors in a wide variety of languages, from Hebrew and Albanian to Italian and Tamil.

Metaphor plays a central role in the Creative Multilingualism programme, and is the subject of our first strand, which is investigating how metaphor works across languages and how it may facilitate creativity. Human beings have always wanted to talk about abstract things – things that can't be seen and touched, like love, beauty and happiness. To do this we need metaphors. But do speakers of other languages use them in the same way as English speakers do? We are interested in the body as a source of metaphors as it’s something which is universal across languages (most of us have heads, arms, stomachs etc.) and can therefore act as an effective window onto how language, culture and metaphors interact.

Below is a selection of metaphors submitted on the night of Curiosity Carnival – can you think of any more? Let us know on Twitter, Facebook, or by email. If you'd like to be kept up to date with the Creative Multilingualism programme's research and events, sign up to our newsletter.

Main mannequin photo by Ian Wallman.

Where next?

Inspiring pupils: multilingual creative writing

Life in a multilingual community

Inventing (the) English: Racism, Multilingualism and Medieval Studies