Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 27, Broken Empire, and Fractured Languages.

This time, we're going to look at the final years of the Western Roman Empire, and the

rise of New Germanic kingdoms in its place.

In these political events, coincided with the division of Latin and the Germanic languages

into new dialects and languages, and these newly emerging languages evolved into many

of the languages of modern Western Europe, including English.

But before we begin, let me mention a couple of things about the podcast.

A couple of listeners have contacted me and indicated that they're having problems downloading

the episodes to their iPhone, and I'm not exactly sure why this is happening, but I wanted

to give you a couple of options if you're having this problem.

First, you can always go to the main website for the podcast, historyofenglishpodcast.com.

Most of the episodes there, and especially the most recent episodes, are saved to a different

server, so you should be able to listen there without any problem.

Also, there's a separate website for the podcast, and that's historyofenglishpodcast.podbeing.com,

and that's podb-e-a-n.com.

That's where the main episodes are hosted, and that's what iTunes uses as well.

Well, if you go to that website, there's a link on the main page that says mobile, and

if you click that link, you can actually add an app to your iPhone for the podcast.

So be sure to check that out if you listen to the podcast with an iPhone.

So with all of that out of the way, let's turn to this episode, and I should note that

there's a lot of late Roman history in this episode.

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