IF YOU LIKE THAT, TRY THESE

HISTORY OF ENGLISH PODCAST

When Kevin Stroud comes home from a hard day’s lawyering in the United States, he sits down to attend to his true passion: writing and recording another episode of his massive history of how the English language developed. Stroud began this Sisyphean labour in 2012 and he’s up to episode 163. More power to him.

WORD OF MOUTH

A long-running Radio 4 series dedicated to the mysterious history and unknowable future of our language, in which Michael Rosen might be snuffling for the roots of such terms as “a murmuration of starlings” with a naturalist, or debating the acceptability of sentences studded with the word “like” with an actual Valley Girl.

GRAMMAR GIRL QUICK AND DIRTY TIPS FOR BETTER WRITING

Presented by Mignon Fogarty, this is an excellent, long-running strand from the United States. It might be dealing with the history of the ampersand one minute, and the next showing how to avoid the linguistic fender-bender “had had” in a sentence. It also keeps a lookout for how gendered languages are facing the challenges of inclusion, and not ignoring nouns, such as scissors and jeans, which are, as we all know, permanently plural.

LUKE’S ENGLISH PODCAST

English is not just words plus grammar. It’s often about a tone of voice, a tone that constantly shifts up and down the social scale in order to convey the complexity of our society. Of the thousands of podcasts for people learning English as a foreign language, here’s one celebrating the things that often confound the initiate, via chats with everyone from Mark Steel to Luke’s mum, baggy conversations that take in events in British life such as the death of the Queen and the career of Liz Truss. Will also suit English speakers.