Theatre-maker Greg Sinclair on the 'unexpected magic' of tongue twisters
Theatre-maker and performance artist Greg Sinclair tells us about his love of tongue twisters from all around the world, and why language can help us to form all sorts of valuable connections.
As a classically trained musician turned performance artist, I have a real love for the musicality of languages. Each language has its own rhythms, tonalities and sounds. And tongue twisters play with all of those things in a really fun way. You’re not necessarily supposed to be good at saying tongue twisters – they’re actually more interesting when you get them wrong - so that leads to some interesting, unexpected music.
In 2016 I was on holiday in Croatia when it was announced that the UK would be leaving the EU. I had voted to remain, and I felt the leave campaign had been largely rooted in racism and xenophobia. And here I was on holiday, surrounded by people that were able to switch easily between multiple languages. I felt a deep sense of shame and knew that I wanted to make an artistic response about how language helps us to form connections with our neighbours.
My response was Seashells, a short film where I perform tongue twisters in eight different languages I don’t speak. The tongue twisters were all gifted to me by friends and members of the local community. It was important to me to meet and speak with people, not just search for tongue twisters on the internet. In the film, each tongue twister has its own costume (created by the amazing designer Alison Brown) inspired by the weird imagery of the words. There’s a crow, someone swaddled in jumpers, and a colourful drag queen to help visually bring them to life. My favourite costume is a jumpsuit made out of crocheted granny squares (made in collaboration with a community knitting group).
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We presented Seashells at the Edinburgh International Children’s Festival which led to them commissioning me to make Tongue Twister for their 2025 festival. The show is aimed at children aged six and over, but it’s absolutely for adults too. Needing to up the stakes, this August there are 13 languages in the show and again the tongue twisters were all gifted to me by people I know or met whilst making the piece.
The languages are English, Norwegian, Gaelic, Polish, French, Setswana, Japanese, Arabic, German, Urdu, Yoruba, Ukrainian, and Greek. Each tongue twister has its own costume, with all the costume changes happening on stage. One big difference between film and live performance is that you can’t just cut from one costume to another in a single frame. So there are some pretty ingenious quick changes to surprise the audience.
My favourite tongue twister in the show is in Yoruba (a West African language): Ọpọlópọ ọpọlọ ló ní ọpọlọ lọ́pọ lọpọ. It translates, roughly, as ‘a lot of frogs have plenty of brains’. It’s really fun to say and has such a poppy rhythm.
The tongue twister which took me the longest to learn is actually pretty short, but full of short little syllables that I kept misordering. I also love Stół z powyłamywanymi nogami, a Polish tongue twister which translates, roughly, as ‘a table with a broken off leg’.
The trickiest tongue twister for me in the show is German, which is ironic as I speak a fair bit of the language: Blaukraut bleibt Blaukraut und Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid (or ‘Blue cabbage remains blue cabbage and wedding dress remains wedding dress’). It’s a proper ‘Zungenbrecher’ or ‘tongue breaker’ as the Germans say.
When I toured Tongue Twister last year, people would come up to me afterwards to share tongue twisters in their own languages. I have an ever-expanding list of these should I ever want to make Tongue Twister 2.
Seeing children and adults so keen to share their languages is testament to why I wanted to make the show. It’s so important, especially at this time where it feels like we are being told by the media to distrust each other's differences, that we keep talking to each other. That’s how we stay connected to people in our communities and internationally. That’s what makes us human.
Tongue Twister is at Pleasance at EICC (Cromdale Theatre), 11.30am, until 22 August as part of the Made in Scotland showcase.
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