Curated playlist
Medieval languages
- Middle EnglishMiddle English is the name given to the forms of the English language spoken in England from the Norman Conquest of 1066 until the late 15th century. It arrived not through a single decision but through the slow, grinding pressure of…
- Old EnglishOld English - also called Englisc, Ænglisc, or Anglo-Saxon - was carried to Britain in the mid-5th century by Germanic settlers from the continent, and it would survive as a living tongue for roughly 700 years. Picture a language so remote…
- Old FrisianOld Frisian stretched along the North Sea coast from roughly modern-day Bruges in Belgium all the way to the Weser River in northwestern Germany. It was spoken from the late 13th century to the end of the 16th century by a people who had…
- Old NorseOld Norse was a North Germanic language spoken across Scandinavia and far beyond during the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages, roughly the 8th through 14th centuries. In the 11th century, it was the most widely spoken European language,…
- Medieval LatinMedieval Latin was the written language that held Europe together for roughly a thousand years. It carried theology from Rome to Ireland, law from conquered kingdoms to their new Germanic rulers, and philosophy from ancient Greece into the…
- Renaissance LatinRenaissance Latin is the literary style that humanist scholars forged from roughly the fourteenth to the fifteenth century, insisting that the centuries of accumulated medieval usage had corrupted the tongue of the Romans. Their rallying…
- Classical TibetanClassical Tibetan carries a second name in Bhutan: Chöke. It is a liturgical language of Tibetan Buddhism, dating from the 9th century. The term refers above all to early canonical texts translated from other languages, especially…
- Norn languageNorn is a dead language that once rang out across the windswept islands of Orkney and Shetland, carried there by Norse settlers who arrived in very substantial numbers around the early 9th century. It was a North Germanic tongue, cousin to…
- Classical ArabicClassical Arabic is a language that has carried the words of the Quran for more than thirteen centuries, and yet most people alive today have never spoken a single sentence of it as their native tongue. It exists in a strange in-between…
- Coptic languageCoptic is a language that has not been spoken natively for centuries, yet it is heard in churches every single week. It is the final form of Egyptian, the tongue that once gave the world words for crocodile, brick, and oasis. Its alphabet…