The Adventure of English - Birth of a Language (1 of 8)

The Adventure of English is a British television series (ITV) on the history of the English language presented by Melvyn Bragg as well as a companion book, also written by Bragg. The series ran in 2003.



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 guttural Germanic dialect to its rise as a truly established global language.



In the television series, Bragg explains the origins of many words, how their spelling became and their use at different times in history.



Episode list:



1. Birth of a Language

2. English Goes Underground

3. The Battle for the Language of the Bible

4. "This Earth, This Realm, This England"

5. English in America

6. Speaking Proper

7. The Language of Empire

8. Many Tongues Called English, One World Language