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The History of the English Language Podcast
The History of the English Language Podcast episodes
- When Two French Dialects Met England: How Anglo‑Norman and Central French Shaped Modern English
Explore how the Norman Conquest introduced an Anglo‑Norman dialect that left a distinct imprint on English words—like castle, judge, and warranty—while later contact with Central French added terms such as chic and toilet. The episode traces these layered borrowings, their social prestige, and what they reveal about power dynamics in language change.
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17 min - Proverbs Through Time: From Scripture to Social Media
In this episode we trace the journey of English proverbs from Old Testament translations and medieval manuscripts to digital meme culture. We explore how scribes, printers, lexicographers, and social media users have kept these compact nuggets alive across centuries.
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17 min - The End of Agreement: How Old English Lost Its Inflectional Flags
Explore why Old English’s complex agreement system faded, the role of Scandinavian contact and phonological erosion, and how this shift gave rise to modern English’s analytic syntax. Hear how scholars traced the process and what it tells us about language change.
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16 min - The Ruff’s Legacy: From 16th‑Century Fashion to English Word Fossil
This episode traces the journey of the ruff—a lavish collar that swept England in the mid‑1500s—from a fashionable status symbol and subject of royal law to an obsolete word now preserved only in dictionaries. We explore how its rise and fall illustrate the volatility of English vocabulary, the role of printing in spelling standardization, and the way fashion can leave linguistic fossils.
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17 min - Singular They: From Middle English to Modern Identity
This episode traces the hidden history of singular ’they’, from its pragmatic use in Chaucer’s Middle‑English manuscripts and court records, through prescriptivist backlash and Shakespeare’s flexible usage, up to today’s gender‑inclusion debates—showing how a centuries‑old pronoun keeps shaping modern English.
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14 min - When Digital Corpora Rewrite History: The OED’s Ever‑Shifting Earliest Citations
In this episode we dive into how digital corpora like COHA, Early English Books Online, and Google Ngram Viewer are constantly pushing back the earliest known uses of words, reshaping dictionary entries and challenging our sense of linguistic chronology. We explore what it means for lexicographers, scholars, and casual users when the “first citation” is no longer a static fact but a moving target.
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17 min - Roman to Arabic: How Numbers Rewrote English
Explore the journey from Roman numerals to Arabic numerals and how this shift reshaped English spelling, commerce, and everyday calculations across centuries. Learn about key figures like Fibonacci and Gutenberg, and see why merchants drove this change that still echoes in our digital age.
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14 min - Donation to Donate: A Back‑Formation Tale of Modern English
Explore how the 19th‑century back‑formation from the noun donation to the verb donate illustrates morphological economy, lexicographic acceptance, and the rise of online giving culture in American English.
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18 min - Spell: From Speech to Sorcery – The Evolving Power of One Word
This episode traces the word ‘spell’ from Old English play‑texts to modern digital incantations. It uncovers how the term shifted between speaking, writing, and magic, revealing the forces that drove each change.
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16 min - Emoji: From Japanese Picture Characters to Global Emoticons
In this episode we trace the word ‘emoji’ from its literal roots in Japanese meaning “picture character” through its accidental association with emotion, how it entered English via Apple and Unicode, and what that says about language change, technology, and cultural contact.
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16 min
About The History of the English Language Podcast
From the publisher's feed
The History of the English Language Podcast, hosted by Josh Linsk, explores how English developed from its earliest roots into one of the world’s most widely spoken languages. Each episode traces the people, migrations, invasions, cultures, technologies, and historical events that shaped English vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, spelling, and everyday speech.
The podcast follows the language through Old English, the Anglo-Saxon period, Viking influence, the Norman Conquest, Middle English, the Great Vowel Shift, Early Modern English, Shakespeare, the printing press, colonial expansion, American English, and the rise of English as a global language. Along the way, it examines where words came from, why meanings changed, how accents developed, and how English absorbed influences from Latin, French, Norse, Greek, and many other languages.
From ancient word origins to slang, dictionaries, dialects, literature, pronunciation, and modern language change, The History of the English Language Podcast brings together linguistics, history, etymology, culture, and the evolution of English for anyone fascinated by how the language became what it is today.