The Story of Human Language
The Story of Human Language
Seasons
March 20, 2025
Professor McWhorter concludes with an etymological sampling of the English language, tracing the origin of every word in the sentence: While the snow fell, she arrived to ask about their fee.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 36 Now
March 20, 2025
There have been many attempts to create languages for use by the whole world. The most successful is Esperanto.
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March 20, 2025
There are many movements to revive dying languages. We explore the reasons that success is so elusive.
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March 20, 2025
Just as there is an extinction crisis among many of the world's animals and plants, it is estimated that 5,500 of the world's languages will no longer be spoken in 2100.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 33 Now
March 20, 2025
Using insights developed in the course to this point, Professor McWhorter takes a fresh look at Black English, tracing its roots to regional English spoken in Britain and Ireland several centuries ago.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 32 Now
March 20, 2025
Just as one dialect shades into another, "creoleness" is a continuum concept. Once we know this, we are in a position to put the finishing touches on our conception of how speech varieties are distributed across the globe.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 31 Now
March 20, 2025
Creoles are the only languages that lack or have very little of the grammatical traits that emerge over time. In this, creole grammars are the closest to what the grammar of the first language was probably like.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 30 Now
March 20, 2025
As new languages, creoles don't have as many frills as older languages, but they do have complexities. Like real languages, creoles change over time, have dialects, and mix with other languages.
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March 20, 2025
Creoles emerge when pidgin speakers use the pidgin as an everyday language. Creoles are spoken throughout the world, wherever history has forced people to expand a pidgin into a full language.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 28 Now
March 20, 2025
This lecture is the first of five on how human ingenuity spins new languages out of old through the creation of pidgins and creoles. A pidgin is a stripped-down version of a language suitable for passing, utilitarian use.
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March 20, 2025
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposes that features of our grammars channel how we think. Professor McWhorter discusses the evidence for and against this controversial but widely held view.
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March 20, 2025
We trace English back to its earliest discernible roots in Proto-Indo-European and follow its fascinating development, including an ancient encounter with a language possibly related to Arabic and Hebrew.
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March 20, 2025
Generally, a language spoken by a small, isolated group will be much more complicated than English. Languages are "streamlined" in this way when history leads them to be learned more as second languages than as first ones.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 24 Now
March 20, 2025
A great deal of a language's grammar is a kind of overgrowth, marking nuances that many or most languages do without. Even the gender marking of European languages is a frill, absent in thousands of other languages.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 23 Now
March 20, 2025
When unrelated or distantly related languages are spoken in the same area for long periods, they tend to become more grammatically similar because of widespread bilingualism.
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March 20, 2025
See how languages also mix their grammars. For example, Yiddish is a dialect of German, but it has many grammatical features from Slavic languages like Polish.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 21 Now
March 20, 2025
The first language's 6,000 branches have not only diverged into dialects, but they have been constantly mixing with one another on all levels. The first of three lectures on language mixture looks at how this process applies to words.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 20 Now
March 20, 2025
Understanding language change and how languages differ helps us see that what is often labeled "wrong" about people's speech is, in fact, a misanalysis.
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March 20, 2025
We often see the written style of language as how it really "is" or "should be." But in fact, writing allows uses of language that are impossible when a language is only a spoken one.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 18 Now
March 20, 2025
When a dialect of a language is used widely in writing and literacy is high, the normal pace of change is artificially slowed, as people come to see "the language" as on the page and inviolable. This helps create diglossia.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 17 Now
March 20, 2025
Diglossia is the sociological division of labor in many societies between two languages, with a "high" one used in formal contexts and a "low" one used in casual ones
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 16 Now
March 20, 2025
Dialects of one language can be called languages simply because they are spoken in different countries, such as Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. The reverse is also true: The Chinese "dialects" are distinctly different languages.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 15 Now
March 20, 2025
The first of five lectures on dialects probes the nature of these "languages within languages." Dialects are variations on a common theme, rather than bastardizations of a "legitimate" standard variety.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 14 Now
March 20, 2025
Despite the hostility of most linguists to the Proto-World hypothesis, there is increasing evidence that many of the world's language families do trace to "mega-ancestors," even if evidence for a Proto-World remains lacking.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 13 Now
March 20, 2025
A few linguists have claimed to reconstruct words from the world's first language, but this work is extremely controversial. Professor McWhorter presents the case against this theory, called the "Proto-World" hypothesis.
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March 20, 2025
The distribution of language families shows how humans have spread through migration. We trace the Austronesian language family to its origins on Formosa.
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March 20, 2025
Semitic languages assign basic meanings to three-consonant sequences and create words by altering the vowels around them. In Sino-Tibetan languages, a sentence tends to leave more to context than we often imagine possible.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 10 Now
March 20, 2025
Linguists have reconstructed the proto-language of the Indo-Europeans by comparing the modern languages. Applying this process, we learn the Proto-Indo-European word for sister-in-law that was spoken 6,000 years ago.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 9 Now
March 20, 2025
The first of four lectures on language families introduces Indo-European, which probably began in the southern steppes of Russia around 4000 BCE and then spread westward to most of Europe and eastward to Iran and India.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 8 Now
March 20, 2025
As recently as Shakespeare, English words had meanings different enough to interfere with our understanding of his language today. Even by the 1800s, Jane Austen's work is full of sentences that would now be considered errors.
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March 20, 2025
The first language has evolved into 6,000 because language change takes place in many directions. Latin split in this way into the Romance languages as changes proceeded differently in each area where the Romans brought Latin.
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March 20, 2025
The meaning of a word changes over time. Silly first meant "blessed" and acquired its current sense through a series of gradual steps.
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March 20, 2025
Language change is not just sound erosion and morphing, but the building of new words and constructions. This lecture shows how such developments lead to novel grammatical features.
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March 20, 2025
The first of five lectures on language change examines how sounds evolve, exemplified by the Great Vowel Shift in English and the complex tone system in Chinese.
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March 20, 2025
We look at evidence that language is an innate ability of the human brain, an idea linked to Noam Chomsky. But many linguists and psychologists see language as one facet of cognition rather than as a separate ability.
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 2 Now
March 20, 2025
Professor John McWhorter introduces the course by exploring two questions: What distinguishes the language ability of humans from the signaling system of animals, and when did humans first acquire language?
Watch The Story of Human Language Season 1 Episode 1 Now
The Story of Human Language is a series categorized as a new series. Spanning 1 seasons with a total of 36 episodes, the show debuted on 2025. The series has earned no reviews from both critics and viewers.
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