As sweeping as the best literature, as profound as the best drama, as unpredictable as the best thriller – as stories go, they don’t get any more remarkable than The Story Of English.
Indeed, this is less a story than an epic. What began as an obscure West Germanic tongue is today the international community’s lingua franca. About one billion people speak it – and another billion are learning it.
The Story Of English examines how a language that was brought to England by a group of Dark Age migrants managed to achieve such prominence. Exploding beyond its island home, this linguistic superpower sparked tremendous social and cultural transformation wherever it went, changing the world forever.