#248 overall
The Story of Human Language
The Great Courses
2 recommenders · 2 threads · recommended in 2 years, 2020–2022 · score 1.8
A lecture series by linguist John McWhorter on the history and development of human language, covering how languages change over time, mix through contact, and form pidgins and creoles.
Commenters call it an engaging introduction to language history and say they learned a lot and were fascinated throughout.
Humanities & Social Sciencebeginnerpaidvideo lectures#linguistics#language evolution#creoles#language contact#mcwhorter
Recommendations by year
20062026
If you find this topic interesting, I highly recommend John McWhorter's course, The Story of Human Language. It's available on Audible / The Great Courses. I learned a lot and was fascinated throughout.
John McWhorter is a well-known linguist who talks about things like comparative linguistics. He's said in the past that (colloquial) Indonesian is one of the most streamlined languages around. (But really English is becoming the world's international language.)
One of the topics in McWhorter's research is about how languages become streamlined when they are learned by adults as a second language. English, Mandarin, and Swahili all show evidence of this (for English, it seems related to the Vikings).
Related post:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/06/co...
For people interested in human languages (or people who don't yet know they're interested in human languages), you might enjoy the courses he's done for Great Courses (paid but worth it, available on ~Amazon):
(1) The Story of Language: covers the topic of language evolution; how languages change over time, how new words are introduced, how languages mix (due to e.g. invasions), pidgins/creoles
(2) Language Families of the World: a survey of what languages currently exist, features of languages in different families