English started as the dialect of a few thousand Germanic invaders on a small island and ended up spoken by more than a billion people. This nine-part series, made with Robert MacNeil as host, traces that spread from Anglo-Saxon settlements through the Norman Conquest's flood of French vocabulary, the standardization pushed by the printing press, and the language's export across the British Empire and into American, Caribbean, and Australian speech. Episodes travel to Appalachia to hear dialects preserved almost unchanged since the 1700s, to the Caribbean to trace Creole English, and into American cities to document Black English and regional accents, treating each variation as evidence rather than corruption. Linguists, historians, and everyday speakers appear on camera alongside archival material and location filming. Made in 1986 and Emmy-winning, the series treats English not as a fixed thing but as a living record of conquest, migration, and trade, still changing as it spreads.