The Adventure of English
The Language of Empire
S1 • E7 Nov 26, 2003 65m
Travelling to parts of the former British Empire, we see how English met other cultures and other languages, and was enriched by them. We travel to India to see how English began as the language of a few hundred pioneer merchants and became the force that unified an Empire of a thousand tongues. In the Caribbean Bragg discovers how a whole flock of new English dialects grew out of a mix of European and African influences, and in Australia he traces how the slang of transported convicts grew in confidence and finally escaped from the shadow of Standard English.
