Stephen Fry presents a survey of human language, moving from how it evolved to how it is used and abused today. In one segment he sits down with linguist Wolfgang Klein to compare structures across different languages, teasing out what they share despite centuries of separate development. The series tracks language from its origins as spoken sound through the invention of writing, and on into the regional dialects and social codes that still mark who belongs where. Fry visits people who study and use language professionally, letting their expertise carry the explanations rather than narrating from a distance. The BBC production treats language less as a fixed set of rules than as a living system that keeps reshaping itself through migration, technology, and everyday conversation. It closes each thread by asking what a given feature of language, whether an accent or an alphabet, actually does for the people who use it.