Robert McCrum was the originator and scriptwriter for the BBC television series ‘The Story of English’, which will be broadcast later this year in the UK and USA. He talks to English Today about the background to the series and its companion book (Faber and the BBC).

The legacy of the 16th century stays with us not only in the works of playwrights like Shakespeare but also through the powerful on-going influence of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.

Nowadays, especially in American books and periodicals, we see ‘anymore’ almost as often as ‘any more’. GERRY ABBOTT has looked at such new composite forms and speculates about where they might be going.

Like Russian and Arabic but unlike French and Japanese, spoken English is a flow of stronger and weaker syllables. Usually the stronger syllables are ‘obvious’, but sometimes they are not – and foreign learners always have problems. The stress patterns of English are complex – they shift with the passing of the years and are by no means the same everywhere.

When the Pilgrim Fathers left Plymouth in 1620 they took with them not just their genes and their ideas but also the local dialects that they spoke. Can their styles of speech be reconstructed, much as the original ‘Plimoth Plantation’ has recently been reconstructed?

In a world where English threatens many other languages it is hard to imagine the English language under attack, but some campaigners in the United States insist that it is – and needs constitutional protection.

By means of katakana, a time-honoured script for domesticating foreign sounds, Japanese is currently absorbing thousands of English words.

English draws heavily from other languages for its vocabulary. A recent book that gives plenty of room to this propensity for borrowing is ROBERT CLAIBORNE's Our Marvelous Native Tongue: The Life and Times of the English Language (Times Books, New York, 1983, $17.25; available in the UK from Abner Stein, Roland Gardens, London SW7 3PH). Excerpted from it here are Claiborne's observations on words of Native American origin, in the chapter entitled ‘English leaps the Atlantic’.

An American living in Mexico and translating French cowboy comics into the language of Mark Twain? Tom McArthur talks to JOHN PINT, re-writer extraordinary.