Written by Seth Lerer
Read by Seth Lerer
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps

The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition, is Professor Seth Lerer's revised and updated investigation of the remarkable history of English, from the powerful prose of King Alfred in the Middle Ages to the modern-day sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sixteen centuries ago a wave of settlers from northern Europe came to the British Isles speaking a mix of Germanic dialects thick with consonants and complex grammatical forms. Today we call that dialect Old English, the ancestor of the language nearly one in five people in the world speaks every day.

How did this ancient tongue evolve into the elegant idiom of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Twain, Melville, and other great writers? What features of modern English spelling and vocabulary link it to its Old English roots? How did English grammar become so streamlined? Why did its pronunciation undergo such drastic changes? How do we even know what English sounded like in the distant past? And how does English continue to develop to the present day?

36 Lectures
30 minutes / lecture


1 Introduction to the Study of Language
2 The Historical Study of Language
3 Indo-European and the Prehistory of English
4 Reconstructing Meaning and Sound
5 Historical Linguistics and Studying Culture
6 The Beginnings of English
7 The Old English Worldview
8 Did the Normans Really Conquer English?
9 What Did the Normans Do to English?
10 Chaucer's English
11 Dialect Representations in Middle English
12 Medieval Attitudes toward Language
13 The Return of English as a Standard
14 The Great Vowel Shift and Modern English
15 The Expanding English Vocabulary
16 Early Modern English Syntax and Grammar
17 Renaissance Attitudes toward Teaching English
18 Shakespeare—Drama, Grammar, Pronunciation
19 Shakespeare—Poetry, Sound, Sense
20 The Bible in English
21 Samuel Johnson and His Dictionary
22 New Standards in English
23 Dictionaries and Word Histories
24 Values, Words, and Modernity
25 The Beginnings of American English
26 American Language from Webster to Mencken
27 American Rhetoric from Jefferson to Lincoln
28 The Language of the American Self
29 American Regionalism
30 American Dialects in Literature
31 The Impact of African-American English
32 An Anglophone World
33 The Language of Science
34 The Science of Language
35 Linguistics and Politics in Language Study
36 Conclusions and Provocations