Melvyn Bragg In Our Time Podcasts & Audiobooks

Melvyn Bragg examines new coinages, puns and wordplay; how accents and social class are entwined; swear words; attempts to stop the evolution of language in its tracks; and, finally, the many varieties of English that are spoken around the world today.

Melvyn Bragg fronts The Written World, a BBC Radio 4 series following the origins of writing from its first appearance 6,000 years ago and exploring how it has shaped the world's intellectual history....

Melvyn Bragg examines some of the many different varieties of English spoken around the world today....

Melvyn Bragg looks at how English has evolved over 1,000 years, looking at the disappearance of old dialects like that of Cumbria, and how it has been enriched by foreign languages, from Latin, Old French, and then dozens more as conquest, trade and immigration played their part in recent centuries.

Melvyn Bragg looks at dialects from around Britain: the Pitmatic of Northumberland, the dialect of (London/Derry), the increasingly elusive Cornish dialect, Pidgin, and Shropshire dialect, then finishing up with a speculation on the future of English dialects.

The Norman Conquest is his starting point, a time when William the Conqueror's `harrying of the North' affected the poor apprentice, the lowly ploughman and the humble shepherd....