The Adventure of English is a British television series (ITV) on the history of the English language presented by Melvyn Bragg as well as a companion book, also written by Bragg. The series ran in 2003.
The series and the book are cast as an adventure story, or the biography of English as if it were a living being, covering the history of the language from its modest beginnings around 500 AD as a minor guttural Germanic dialect to its rise as a truly established global language.
In the television series, Bragg explains the origins of many words, how their spelling became and their use at different times in history.
In this eight part series, Melvyn Bragg, explores the development of the English Language over the last 1500 years. The first four programmes explain how this insignificant German dialect has evolved into a global language now spoken and understood by more people than any other in the world. The remaining four programmes visit various countries around the world to show the differences in modern English. Written by Mark Smith
