Love history, the English language, surreal comedy, and voice-over artists with Oxford English accents? Check out “The History of English in Ten Minutes”; it’s 1,600 years of language history, crammed into ten one-minute tracks.

Track titles

1. Anglo-Saxon (Whatever happened to the Jutes?)
2. The Norman Conquest (Excuse my English)
3. Shakespeare (A plaque on both his houses)
4. The King James Bible (Let there be light reading)
5. The English of Science (How to speak with gravity)
6. English and Empire (The sun never sets on the English language)
7. The Age of the Dictionary (The definition of a hopeless task)
8. American English (Not English but somewhere in the ballpark)
9. Internet English (Language reverts to type)
10. Global English (Whose language is it anyway?)

© The Open University; also licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0: UK: England & Wales.

YouTube compilation: OUlearn (Learn with The Open University YouTube channel).

Voice-over: Clive Anderson.