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The History of the English Language Podcast
The History of the English Language Podcast episodes
- Recreating Shakespeare’s Voice: The Original Pronunciation of Early Modern English
Explore how scholars reconstruct the way Shakespeare actually spoke—right at the cusp of the Great Vowel Shift—and why that matters for understanding his puns, rhythm, and rhyme. From phonetic evidence to the 2024 Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation, this episode unpacks the science and art behind reviving a lost voice.
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20 min - Slang as Living Innovation: How Street‑Born Words Shape Modern English
Explore how slang—originating in subcultures from prison crews to TikTok creators—is a dynamic engine of linguistic change, driving vocabulary, phonology, and social identity across centuries of English evolution.
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16 min - Burgle or Burglarize? A Back‑Formation Tale in English Dialects
In this episode we trace how the noun burglar gave rise to the verb burgle through back‑formation, explore why British and American speakers treat the two forms differently, and see how legal usage, phonology, and digital culture have shaped their lives today.
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18 min - Dialect Drift: Are English Accents Clustering or Splitting?
In this episode we trace how English dialects have been shaped by migration, media, and digital communities, asking whether they’re becoming more similar or increasingly distinct. We examine the forces of levelling, innovation, and cultural identity that drive the evolution of accents across continents.
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20 min - From Prison Lines to Silicon Valley Sprints: Tracing the Evolution of ‘Deadline’
This episode explores how the word deadline evolved from a literal line on a Confederate prison wall to a ubiquitous term in printing, bureaucracy, and digital tech. We uncover the social, technological, and linguistic forces that reshaped its meaning over more than a century.
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18 min - Prestige in Motion: How Social Status Drives the Evolution of English
This episode dives into how prestige shapes accents, vocabulary and grammatical norms from medieval London to TikTok. We trace elite speech patterns that fueled standardization, dictionary codification, and social‑media‑accelerated change, highlighting key figures—from Labov to modern language apps—who show why status remains a powerful force in English evolution.
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18 min - The Letter U Splits in Two: Tracing English’s Foot‑Strut Vowel Divide
In this episode we track how the single vowel /u:/ split into the distinct sounds heard in ‘foot’ and ‘strut’, exploring its roots in the Great Vowel Shift, printing practices, and regional dialects. We also follow the word ‘peculiar’ from Latin property to modern oddness, illustrating how legal, cultural, and technological forces reshape meaning.
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17 min - From Factories to Accents: How Industrial Cities Forged England’s Working‑Class Dialects
This episode traces how the boom of late‑eighteenth‑century industrialization brought diverse speakers into Britain’s new cities, forcing their speech to merge and evolve into distinct urban dialects such as Cockney, Scouse and Mancunian. We explore the sociolinguistic forces—migration, class pressure, media influence—and the work of scholars like Peter Trudgill that revealed these varieties are systematic languages in their own right.
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17 min - From Hros to Horse: The Metathesis Story
Explore how the Old English word for horse shuffled from H‑R‑O‑S to H‑O‑R‑S‑E, revealing the mechanics of metathesis, the influence of printing, and the stubborn persistence of spelling reforms in English history.
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16 min - The History of 'a': From Old English Numeral to Modern Article
Explore how the tiny word ‘a’ transformed from an Old English numeral into a modern indefinite article, tracing its phonological shifts, printing influence, advertising usage, and even its silent‑letter cousin queue. The episode stitches together linguistic evolution with cultural moments that shaped English’s global reach.
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17 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.