The History of the English Language Podcast

Explore how the Latin‑derived "autumn" and the colloquial "fall" entered English, why one prevailed in Britain and the other in America, and what this seasonal split reveals about printing, colonial expansion, and regional identity.

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This episode traces the colon’s journey from a pair of dots in Hellenistic rhetoric, through medieval Latin manuscripts and the printing press, into 21st‑century digital communication and programming syntax. We examine key figures like Aldus Manutius, Caxton, and modern tech developers to see how a simple punctuation mark became a cultural icon.

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Explore how the once‑common dual pronouns of Old English disappeared through contact with Norse, printing pressures, and digital shorthand. This episode traces the grammatical shift from a rich inflectional system to our modern two‑plus structure and examines why such changes shape language learning today.

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In this episode we trace the birth of "World Englishes" and examine how colonial rule left a legacy that now manifests in vibrant local varieties across India, Nigeria, Singapore, and beyond. We explore policy debates, digital diffusion, and the economic logic behind embracing multiple Englishes.

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This episode unpacks how Old English alliteration in poems like Beowulf forged a shared oral tradition, traces English’s place within the Indo‑European family tree from Proto‑Germanic to West Germanic, and follows the letter W from its runic origins through medieval manuscripts to modern digital typography. We explore key scholars, historical shifts, and how these elements shaped today’s English.

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This episode traces the evolution of the letter J from a decorative long i in medieval manuscripts to its modern status as a separate grapheme. We examine the role of scribes, Caxton’s printing press, the King James Bible, and early dictionaries in cementing this change, and reflect on what it reveals about orthographic stability and digital text today.

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We trace the word ‘parliament’ from its Old French roots through Latin and Greek, through the Norman Conquest’s bilingual court, to its institutionalization in England and spread across the British Empire. Hear how a simple verb became the name of a global legislative institution.

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Explore how the humble hyphen evolved from a printer’s line‑breaker into a linguistic signifier of compound words, shaped by dictionaries, technology and everyday slang. The episode traces its journey through the Great Vowel Shift, printing innovations, early modern standardization, and the rapid rise of online communication.

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Explore how 19th‑century lexicographer James Murray built the Oxford English Dictionary using a network of paper slips, community contributions, and meticulous sorting. The episode reveals the human logistics that laid the groundwork for today’s digital reference tools.

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Explore how the Old English verb steorfan, meaning simply ‘to die’, evolved into modern 'starve'—a word now tied to hunger. We trace semantic narrowing through medieval famines, key dictionaries, and legal usage to show how language reshapes itself over centuries.

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