If you had a time machine capable of travelling back centuries, how far back could you go and still understand the English language?

This isn’t a question many of us will have pondered before. Because time travel is currently impossible. However, with languages constantly evolving, it’s a genuinely good question.

It turns out that you could easily go back a few hundred years and be understood. Apart from the odd word and turn of phrase that was very much of its time.

However, travel back 1,000 years and it will sound like the native English-speakers are talking in tongues. Which means the same will be true if you travelled 1,000 years into the future.