SPEAKER: This is the South bank in London.

Two thousands year ago, if

you’d heard a human voice around here, the language would have been
incomprehensible. A thousand years ago the English language had established its
first base camp. Today English circles the globe, it inhabits the air we breathe.
What started as a guttural tribal dialect seemingly isolated in a small island is now
the language of well over a thousand million people around the world.
The story of the English language is an extraordinary one. It has
characteristics of a bold unsuccessful adventure. Tenacity, luck, near extinction on
more than one occasion, dazzling flexibility and an extraordinary power to absorb.
And it’s still going on. New dialects, new Englishes are evolving all the time all
over the world. Successive invasions introduced, then threatened to destroy our
language. Our first programme tells that story. For 300 years English was forced
underground.
Our second program tells how it survived and how it fought back. Our third
program will tell how the English language took on the power blocks of church
and state. Our forth – how it became the language of Shakespeare. In later
programmes, we are going to leave these shores, as English did, to tell the story of
how in America the language of one great empire became that of another. We’ll go
to the Caribbean where a variety of new part-English dialects took root. India –
where English became a commanding, unifying language in the country of a
thousand tongues. And Australia where a confident new English was invented by a
people, many of whom had been expelled from their mother country. We’ll travel
through time, too, to explore how English in the 21st century has become the
international language of business, the language in which the world’s citizens
communicate. Over the last 1500 years, these small islands have achieved much
that is remarkable. But in my view, England’s greatest success story of all is the
English language.
These programs are about the words we think in, talk in, write in, sing in, the
words that describe the life we live.
 This is where we can begin. Just after dawn, in a foreign country, on a flat
shore, by the North Sea, in what we now call the Netherlands. /Birds singing/
This is Friesland and it’s in this part of the world that we can still hear the
modern language that we believe sounds closest to what the ancestor of English
sounded like 1500 years ago.
In 597, the monk and prior Augustine led a mission from Rome to Kent.
Around the same time, Irish monks of the Celtic church were establishing a
presence in the north. Within a century, Christians built churches and monasteries.
This is St. Paul’s in Jarrow, parts of which date from the 7th century.
Faith and stone weren’t the only things the Christian missionaries brought to
the country. They brought the international language of the Christian religion.
Latin. Latin terms became parts of the English word hoard. “Altare” became
“altar”. “Apostolus” became “apostle”. “Mass”, “monk” and “verse” and many
others all come from the Latin. This would become a pattern of English, the
layering of words, taken from different source languages. And from Latin, too, the
English took their script. The Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and Jutes who would
become the English hadn't brought script as we know it with them, but runes. The
runic alphabet was made up of symbols formed mainly of straight lines so that the
letters could be carved into stone or wood.
Those were their media, rather than parchment or paper. Though this is a
short poem, most examples of runic writing that survive suggest runes were mainly
used for short, practical messages or graffiti.
No one knows who composed the epic "Beowulf" sometime between the mid 7th
and end of the 10th century. It's the first great poem in the English language, the
beginning of a glorious tradition which will lead to Chaucer, Shakespeare, and
beyond. The poem celebrates the glory days of the Germanic tribes, epitomized in
the heroic warrior who gives the poem its name. The power of the language can be
heard in this passage, which introduces Beowulf's archenemy, the monster
Grendel.
Latin and Greek had created great bodies of literature in the classical past. In
the East, Arabic and Chinese were being used in the 8th and 9th century as
languages of poetry. But at that time, no other language in the Christian world
could match the achievement of the "Beowulf" poet and his anonymous
contemporaries.
Old English was flourishing. The adventure was under way. But while the
seeds of English had come from these Frisian shores in the 5th century, so, now, in
the late 8th century, a potential destroyer was preparing his battle fleet 500 miles or
so to the north.
In the late 8th century, the Latin-based culture of scholarship, which had
grown up in places like Lindisfarne and which had also been the cradle of Old
English, faced extinction from across the sea. These ruins are of the medieval
monastery that stood on the island of Lindisfarne.
Some Old Norse words stayed in the local dialects of the north, words like
beck for stream and garth for paddock. As a boy in Wigton, I remember hearing
and using dialect words like slattery for shower, slape for slippery, yet for gate,
lap for leap, yek for oak, and yam for home, as in "I's gangen yam." Pure Norse,
heard in Wigton every night of the week. And there were many others. But the
influence of Old Norse wasn't just local. All around the country, over time,
hundreds of Norse words entered the mainstream of English, and we still use them
every day.
The s-k sound is a characteristic of Old Norse, and English borrowed words
like "score" and "sky" and "skive", as well as perhaps a thousand others, including
anger, bull, freckle, knife, neck, root, scowl, and window.
(Indistinct speaking)
SPEAKER: Sometimes where both Old Norse and Old English had a word
for the same thing, both words lived on in English, each taking on a slightly
different meaning. Where Old English said craft, Old Norse said skill. For an
English hide, the Norse said skin. In Old English, you were sick. In Norse, you
were ill. Here was another example of English's extraordinary ability to absorb, to
take in words from other languages, adding them to its word hoard, increasing the
richness and flexibility of the vocabulary.
 Here in Winchester, Alfred had established what was, effectively, a
publishing house. Other projects he undertook included the commissioning of "The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle", detailing hundreds of years of history. Alfred died in
899. One of his legacies was an English language which was more prestigious and
widely read than ever before. There was nothing to compare with this range of
written vernacular, history, philosophy, poetry anywhere else in mainland Europe.
English was out on its own. By the middle of the 11th century, English
seemed secure. But now other invaders were waiting in the wings, and English was
about to face its greatest threat ever. This place, the old Roman fort at Pevensey,
was a fateful one for the English language.
It was here, among other places, that the Frisians and other Germanic tribes
had made landfall in the 5th century and introduced their own language.
Now, in 1066, another wave of invaders was landing - the Normans. When,
in 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, sailed with his army to claim the English
throne, he was sure he had right on his side. The English king, Edward the
Confessor, had spent many years in Normandy and, in that time, contemporary
sources say, had come to regard William as a brother or even a son and had named
him as his successor.
Sensing his impending death and fearing rebellion at home, the childless
Edward had dispatched Harold Godwinson, his wife's brother, and his Earl of
Essex, the richest and most powerful of the English lords, to Normandy to pledge
loyalty to William. This Harold did, swearing on two caskets of holy relics. But
when Edward did die, Harold, supported by the English nobility, had himself
crowned in Westminster Abbey on the very day that Edward was laid to rest there.
To the truculent and ruthless William, this was an affront, invasion with maximum
force the only possible response. The armies met here, near Hastings. This is the
spot where, traditionally, Harold fell, fatally pierced through the eye with an arrow.
The site was later named after the engagement, but it's named not with an English
word like fight, but with a word from the language of the Norman victors - battle.
Harold would be the last English-speaking king of England for three centuries. On
Christmas Day 1066, William was crowned in Westminster Abbey in a service
conducted in English and Latin. William spoke French throughout. A new king and
a new language were in authority in England.
Enemy. Castle. Castle was one of the first French words to enter the English
language. The Normans built a chain of them to impose their rule on the country.
This magnificent castle at Rochester was one of the first to be fortified in stone. By
blood, the Normans were from the same stock as the Norsemen who'd invaded in
earlier centuries. But they no longer spoke a Germanic language rather, what we'd
call Old French, which had grown from Latin roots. Many of the words they spoke
would have been very strange to the native English, but would quickly become
unpleasantly familiar.
Our words army, archer, soldier, garrison, and guard all come from the
conquering Norman French. French was the language that spelled out the
architecture of the new social order - crown, throne, and court, duke, baron, and
nobility, peasant, vassal, servant. The word govern comes from French, as do
liberty, authority, obedience, and traitor. The Normans took the law into their own
hands. Felony, arrest, warrant, justice, judge, and jury all come from French. And
so do accuse, acquit, sentence, condemn, prison, and jail. It's been estimated that
in the three centuries after the conquest, about 1 0,000 French words colonized the
English language. They didn't all come in immediately, but the conquest opened a
conduit of French vocabulary that's remained open, on and off, ever since. Today,
French words are all around us.
When this record of the country was drawn up, it was written in Latin, not
Norman French...and certainly not English. Between them, French and Latin had
become the languages of state, law, the church, and history itself in England. The
writing of English became increasingly rare. Even "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle"
guttered into silence.
The language of Alfred and the "Beowulf" poet had lost all the prestige that
it had slowly built up. In a country of three languages, English was now a poor
third, bottom of the pile. The English language had been forced underground. It
would take 300 years for it to re-emerge, and when it did, it would have changed
dramatically.