Best YouTube videos on Language & Words
4 videos our team picked as worth your time. Paste any of them into YouTube Collector for the full transcript, a chaptered summary, and search across everything you save.
Thoth's Pill - an Animated History of Writing (Full)
A beautifully animated history of how humanity learned to write, from clay tokens and hieroglyphs to alphabets and printing, and how it reshaped memory, power and the spread of ideas. (Published 23 Feb 2016)
Champollion and the Secret Behind the Decoding of Hieroglyphs I SLICE HISTORY | FULL DOCUMENTARY
The race to read the unreadable: how a young scholar named Champollion cracked Egyptian hieroglyphs and gave a lost civilisation its voice back. (Published 30 Jan 2026)
Birth of a Language - BBC Documentary | Ep.1 The Adventure Of English
Melvyn Bragg traces English from a minor Germanic dialect spoken by a few thousand settlers to the brink of extinction and back, a story of invasions, survival, and the words that came along. (Published 25 Apr 2016)
Stephen Fry's Planet Word episode 1 Babel
Stephen Fry explores the deepest question about language, where did it come from, and why are humans the only species that has it? He meets feral-child researchers and "singing" mice with a human language gene. (Published 2 Jan 2025)