The Adventure of English

We are going to delve down to the roots of the language and deduce its history - and in that one sentence we hear words from four different sources; d...

We see how England was ruled for three centuries after the Conquest by a French-speaking king and court which used Latin for their official business....

This is the story of how English became the battleground in the fight for men's souls. The medieval church establishment kept the Bible in Latin, whil...

Visiting the England of Queen Elizabeth the First shows how naval enterprise and foreign trade brought scores of new words into the language. Scholars...

Following the English language on its journey overseas and tracing the story of how the language of the British Isles became a language for the world...

In eighteenth century Britain, the first English dictionary was produced. A cohort of grammarians imposed new rules on the language. English continued...

Travelling to parts of the former British Empire, we see how English met other cultures and other languages, and was enriched by them. We travel to In...

The concluding episode looks at how in the 20th century the rise of America as an industrial power has made it the driving force behind the global spr...