🎧 Lectures 20-22 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 20-22: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 20: Language Mixture—Words
The first language's 6,000 branches have not only diverged into dialects, but they have been constantly mixing with one another on all levels. The first of three lectures on language mixture looks at how this process applies to words.

Lecture 21: Language Mixture—Grammar
Languages also mix their grammars. For example, Yiddish is a dialect of German, but it has many grammatical features from Slavic languages like Polish. There are no languages without some signs of grammar mixture.

Lecture 22: Language Mixture—Language Areas
When unrelated or distantly related languages are spoken in the same area for long periods, they tend to become more grammatically similar because of widespread bilingualism.