How the English language is developing
If you have ever "lost the plot" when faced with indecipherable everyday expressions, Ian Stuart-Hamilton's new reference guide should come in handy. 'An Asperger dictionary of everyday expressions' is being pitched as "an addictive reference guide that explains precisely what people mean when they don't say what they mean." Asperger's syndrome is a form of autism that makes it difficult for sufferers to interpret everyday phrases that rely on symbolism rather than literal meanings. There are thousands of examples of phrases that if taken literally by anyone would be either meaningless or incomprehensible. For example "take the bull by the horns", which means to deal with a problem directly and decisively, might illicit any number of bemused reactions.
The reference guide is a light-hearted yet comprehensive reference tool with bucketloads of useful information, and a few fascinating surprises to boot, for people with or without Asperger's syndrome. (Society Guardian, 28 July 2004)
The reference guide is a light-hearted yet comprehensive reference tool with bucketloads of useful information, and a few fascinating surprises to boot, for people with or without Asperger's syndrome. (Society Guardian, 28 July 2004)
The value of the English language's dominance in international business and politics was put at £5,455 billion, more than the combined worth of the Japanese and German languages.,, according to a speaker at a conference at the Royal Society of Arts on the English language. However, the dominance of the language is threatened by its very success because so many people will learn a form of English that it will break up into mutually unintelligible dialects. To keep English as the international language of business, users may find themselves having to learn it twice: once as a local dialect and again in a standardised form.
"The danger is that English may become diglossic [the existence in a language of a high ,or socially prestigious, and a low, or everyday form] in the same way that Arabic, Greek and German already have done," Professor David Crystal, editor of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, said.
In 1996 up to 85% of messages conveyed on the Internet were in English. Now the proportion is down to 60% and falling. Professor Crystal stopped counting other languages on the Internet when he reached 2000.
Davis Blair, from Macquarie University in Australia, pointed out that Greek, Latin and French preceded English "at the lingua franca summit". He said: "The very fact that each lost its place should caution us in our linguistic chauvinism."
English is the mother-tongue of more than 400 million people, and the official language for a further 400 million, mainly in the former British colonies. Between a quarter and a third of the world's population can already use it, and the only other candidate for global status is Spanish, the world's fastest growing language.
About 90% of the world's computers connected to the Internet are based in English-speaking countries. Mote than 80% of home pages on the Web are in English, while the next greatest, German, has only 4.5% and Japanese 3.1%.
(The Times, 19 March 2001)
British marketing consultancy firm The Fourth Room conducted a survey to gauge the extent of the nation's literacy on the web and found that the use of email has had a devastating impact on the standard of written English.
According to the research, computer users today are too lazy to hit the 'shift' buttons on their keyboards - emails are frequently written entirely in lower case, with no capital letters for names or the beginning of sentences.
Chief Executive officer Piers Schmidt commented: Language is a living thing. You can't expect it to stay the same. And with the internet, email and mobile phone messaging, the changes happen much more quickly. In the space of just a few years a new language has developed - we call it weblish instead of standard English. It's a sort of shorthand for the 21st century.
The latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary includes 62 new words representing the changes in our communication culture including e-commerce, dot.com and webcam.
John Simpson, chief editor of the dictionary says, "The standards may be different now but it has certainly encouraged writing and communication. And that means a faster development of language change. There are a whole raft of words that either come from the internet or where the internet has given them new meanings.
The Queen's English Society says it wants to "defend the precision, subtlety and marvellous richness of our language against debasement, ambiguity and other forms of misuse."
(Daily Mirror, 26 January 2001)
According to the British Council, by the end of the year 2000 the number of people with English as a second language will overtake the number of people for whom the language is their mother tongue. More than 750 million people already speak English well enough to use it for business or computing. A billion are in the process of learning the language.
(Independent, 31 October 2000)
Modal verbs such as ‘shall’, ‘should’, ‘must’, ‘may’ and ‘ought’ are in terminal decline according to academics who have charted changes in grammar since 1961. They are being replaced by Americanisms such as the written equivalent of ‘gotta’ and ‘gonna’.
Professor Geoffrey Leech of Lancaster University’s linguistic department is philosophical about the changes. "There is no point in being other than fatalistic," he said. He is carrying out a three-year study of how grammar in written English has changed. The work is based on a million words collected by Professor Leech in 1961 in extracts from newspapers, magazines, academic journals and books. This has been compared with a matching collection set up in 1991.
Professor Leech said: "Two strong tendencies can be summed up as Americanisation and colloquialisation. The modal verbs are one example of American influence – the evidence suggests that the British in the Nineties are roughly catching up with where the Americans were in the Sixties. Colloquialisation is a trend towards more informal grammar, where writing imitates speech habits."
One lesson for schools, he suggests, is that they should not waste time teaching children outdated grammatical forms. Textbooks were often out of date and devoted too much space to the use of words such as shall and ought which were increasingly rare, he added.
(Independent, 13 August 1999)
