This is the concluding episode of the series and I wasn't expecting much. The finales to series like this are too often summaries of what has already been shown. Five minutes of watching air traffic controllers how easy and workable the universal use of English as a working language is. Pundits telling us that English is on its way to conquering the world and snuffing out Coast Salish and so on.
Instead, this is at least as informative, and as pleasant to watch, as any of the earlier episodes. There isn't much overlap with earlier material. The emphasis is on the interaction between modern American English and English-English. Jitterbug, anyone?
I was glad to see that he introduced some linguists of the past or, I suppose, philologists, as they might have been called. They were historians who saw language as part of culture. Jacob Grimm (of "the Grimm brothers" fame) is mentioned in passing. Half the episode could have been devoted to his work. He wrote the first non-trivial description of a sound shift in Indo-European languages. There's no room to get into it, but Grimm's law explains how Sanskrit "sitar", German "zither" and English "guitar." He alludes to Jesperson too, another Big Name in early linguistics.
They were important figures because before them, the arguments were about which language was better than others. French was "nasal" and "too complicated". English was "rich" and "vibrant", and so forth. After them, the study of languages became relative to culture. Each language did its job equally well within its own milieu. English is booming. About a third of the world's population is familiar with it.
I don't know that it will replace Mandarin Chinese, which is spoken by more people, but I think it's apt that, as Latin was once the language of scholarship and French was the language of the court, English is becoming the language of commerce and consumerism. It's officially used everywhere. It's the working language of the Association of Baltic Marine Biologists and the African Hockey Federation. No kidding.
In the last chapter of this final program, Bragg visits several places in England, including a school in Yorkshire that has a large population from the Middle East and South Asia. Their natives languages are Punjabi or Farsi or Urdu. The kids learn English in school, but they speak it with a YORKSHIRE ACCENT. There's quite a bit of dry, understated humor in this series.
And the series itself is exceptional.
