The series and the book are cast as an adventure story, or the biography of English as if it were a living being, covering the history of the language from its modest beginnings around 500 AD as a minor Germanic dialect to its rise as a truly established global language.
In
the television series, Bragg explains the origins and spelling of many
words based on the times in which they were introduced into the growing
language that would eventually become modern English.
Many Tongues Called English, One World Language: The globalisation of the English language in the 20th century owes most to the United States. Here we look at the predominance of American Black street talk, how the Second World War and American movies threatened to “infect” the mother tongue in Britain and how some nations are attempting to stamp in the invasion of English out – for example franglais in France and Singlish in Singapore.
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