Watch The Story of Human Language

2025
1 Season

Linguist Dr. John McWhorter takes you on a fascinating, 36-lecture tour of the development of human language—he unfolds the story of how a single tongue spoken 300,000 years ago may have evolved into the estimated 7,000 languages used worldwide today. Discover why, for the past century, linguistics has been one of the most exciting and productive fields in the social sciences.

The Story of Human Language is a series that is currently running and has 1 seasons (36 episodes). The series first aired on March 20, 2025.

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Seasons

36. Finale: Master Class

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.

35. Artificial Languages

March 20, 2025

There have been many attempts to create languages for use by the whole world. The most successful is Esperanto. Sign languages for the deaf are also artificial languages, though ones fully equipped with grammar, nuance, and dialects.

34. Language Death: Prognosis

March 20, 2025

There are many movements to revive dying languages. We explore the reasons that success is so elusive. For one, people often see their unwritten native language as less "legitimate" than written ones used in popular media.

33. Language Death: The Problem

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.

32. What Is Black English?

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.

31. Language Starts Over: The Creole Continuum

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.

30. Language Starts Over: Signs of the New

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.

29. Language Starts Over: Creoles II

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.

28. Language Starts Over: Creoles I

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.

27. Language Starts Over: Pidgins

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.

26. Does Culture Drive Language Change?

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.

25. A New Perspective on the Story of English

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.

24. Language Interrupted

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.

23. Language Develops beyond the Call of Duty

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.

22. Language Mixture: Language Areas

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.

21. Language Mixture: Grammar

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. There are no languages without some signs of grammar mixture.

20. Language Mixture: Words

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.

19. Dialects: The Fallacy of Blackboard Grammar

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.

18. Dialects: Spoken Style, Written Style

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.

17. Dialects: The Standard as Token of the Past

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.

16. Dialects: Two Tongues in One Mouth

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

15. Dialects: Where Do You Draw the Line?

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.

14. Dialects: Subspecies of Species

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.

13. The Case for the World

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.

12. The Case against the World

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.

11. Language Families: Clues to the Past

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. Similar work sheds light on the history of Africa and North America.

10. Language Families: Diversity of Structures

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.

9. Language Families: Tracing Indo-European

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.

8. Language Families: Indo-European

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.

7. How Language Changes: Modern English

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.

6. How Language Changes: Many Directions

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.

5. How Language Changes: Meaning and Order

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. Word order also changes: In Old English, the verb usually came at the end of a sentence.

4. How Language Changes: Building New Material

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.

3. How Language Changes: Sound Change

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.

2. When Language Began

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.

1. What Is Language?

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?

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Where to Watch The Story of Human Language

The Story of Human Language is available for streaming on the The Great Courses website, both individual episodes and full seasons. You can also watch The Story of Human Language on demand at Apple TV Channels, Prime Video and Amazon.