Editorial: The Changing Face of the English Language

By Elizabeth Milo

Stay-at-home moms and collegiate educators alike are crying out in concern that the English language is decaying right before our very ears. For years there has been a growing panic across the nation that our language is deteriorating into something unrecognizable, and quite frankly, bad. Those who bewail the loudest that the sky is falling are concerned that as slang, “abrevs,” and dangling participles enter the language, English will become something decrepit and twisted. The sensation that is sweeping the nation, though, is founded on some misguided points:

1) There are better and worse languages
a) English is a better language
b) Fancy English is the best language
2) Kids these days don’t know how to talk properly
a) Slang is something that kids use
b) Text messaging is ruining English
3) Languages should not change

Perhaps you nodded adamantly while reading this list, or perhaps you laughed because you caught the tongue-in-cheek tone. But even if you laughed, you may still secretly agree with one or more of these points. Not THESE exact points, of course. Something more like this: The result of excessive text-messaging among young adults and teens is that their language skills are compromised. These young people incorporate slang terms, expressions, and abbreviations into everyday speech which compromises the quality of the English language. It is possible that in 100 years, English could be unrecognizable. Sounds scary, right? Kids will turn in term papers that look like text messages. The face of English will be changed forever—our language destroyed. The simple fact of the matter is that this will not happen, no way, no how.

What may happen is that English will change— maybe a lot, maybe a little. Either way, it’s too soon to tell. But English has been changing since there was such a thing that we could even call “English.” Old English was a conglomeration of Germanic and Celtic dialects. Middle English was a cross between Old French and Anglo-Saxon. Though we recognize Shakespeare’s words, the way his English sounded would sound nothing like our own. And eventually, English will move into a new stage beyond our own. It’s the fate of languages that things will change, blend, and mesh together to form different breeds and hybrids that become the language of future generations.

Back to the issue at hand (a.k.a. the inevitable destruction of the English which we all know and love in t-minus one generation), the changes which we are seeing now are not as alarming as people make them out to be. These are not the precursors to a huge linguistic shift like the ones I just outlined. Little changes, like the addition of slang and abbreviations into a generation’s lexicon, is neither new nor alarming. World renowned linguist and speaker David Crystal recently published a book entitled Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 about the text messaging phenomenon of the 21st century. In his book, Crystal outlines the truth about text messaging and technology. The kinds of slang and abbreviations that enter the language because of technology have been happening for as long as the written word has been around. Ancient scribes used shorthand tricks to save them time and space. Young lovers who wrote letters in the early 20th century used abbreviations like TTFN or SWAK that were just as much a part of their culture as BRB and TTYL are a part of the cultures of younger generations now. Many studies even suggest that because of the amount of writing young people do between instant messaging, texting, and blogging, their writing skills are actually increasing.

Everybody has a rule about which they are a stickler. If I had said, “Everybody has a rule they are a stickler about” (an example of the much dreaded dangling participle), to some people that would have been the reading equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. But it would have been perfectly understood! Language, in its simplest definition, is just a system of sounds to which people have agreed to assign meanings. For any good system to work, there must be rules, and there are rules within English which are simply too fundamental to ever be broken or changed—not because it’s bad to change them, but because nothing would make sense anymore. Avoiding dangling participles is not one of those rules. Even the meaning of words isn’t sacred; we can see how in just the past two centuries the meaning of a word like “awful” means something different to us than it did to readers of Jane Austen. Of course, we add words as well, like the verb “google.” What happens if someday the search engine Google no longer exists? Either the term “to google” would die out, or it would remain in the language as a term which meant “to investigate, or to look up,” and it would become another odd idiosyncrasy of the English language.

Yes, English is changing, but it is not decaying before our very eyes. Small, sometimes even imperceptible changes are taking place in the way we say our vowels, or use certain words, that over very long periods of time result in significant changes to the language. These changes, though, don’t make the language weaker or worse than it was before. Humans have a difficult time encountering change, but if we look at the history of our language, we see that the changes which frighten us now are so insignificant they’re practically microscopic. English has not started spiraling downward, but instead is chugging along at the same pace it’s been going for the past two thousand years.