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

This is Episode 83, a trilingual nation.

In this episode, we're going to dig through the surviving documents from the reign of Henry

II to try to figure out the state of language in 12th century England.

At first glance, this may seem like a straightforward issue, but the problem is that England had become

a linguistic melting pot, and the linguistic situation was a bit of a mess.

Latin, French, and English were all in regular use, but few people spoke all three languages.

Each language was largely reserved for certain uses by certain people.

So this time, we'll try to sort through the documents and figure out what was going

on.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is HistoryofEnglishPodcast.com,

and you can sign up to support the podcast at patreon.com, just go to HistoryofEnglishPodcast.com and link from there.

The most recent bonus episode posted there looks at the history of words related to family members.

You can find out if a grandfather is really grand, and if a great grandfather is really great.

And speaking of the history of words, I want to mention a couple of other podcasts that have come to my attention,

and I think they might be of interest to many of you as well.

First, Ray Belay is put together a podcast called Words for Granted that looks at the etymology of particular words.

Each episode is dedicated to one word, and if you love etymology, I think you'll love his podcast.

Again, it's called Words for Granted.

And since I'm mentioning podcasts about etymology, I should also mention lexicon valley and away with words.

I'm sure many of you are familiar with those. They've been around for quite a while, but if you're not familiar with them, you should definitely check them out.

So with that, let's turn to this episode.

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