Present Day English

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A Language in Decay? Drivers of Change

As we move into this section, you will be familiar with some of the influences on language. Present day English refers to the period from 1900 to present day.

The World Wars

The first half of the 20th Century is characterised by war.
In particular, the First and Second World War had a massive impact of social class and prejudice.
It led to soldiers fighting together regardless of class, accent or level of standard English.

Postwar

Post-WW2, we see a much greater acceptance of things like regional variations.
In addition, war led to immigration into our countries, such as the Windrush generation.
This led to increase in multiculturality in our country.

Technology

Perhaps the biggest driver for change in the past 35 years is the invention of the internet and our increasing dependence on technology.
Technology has resulted in a mass influx of new words into our language, like ‘laptop’, ‘WiFi’ and ‘iPhone’.

Emails and texts

It also led to the rise of emails to communicate.
Danet believes that emails are ‘double enhanced’ and ‘doubly attenuated’ and don’t fit in either mode.
In addition, technology has led to one of the most controversial changes and adaptations to language we’ve ever seen – texting.

Texting

Technology has led to one of the most controversial changes and adaptations to language we’ve ever seen – texting.

Creativity

Texting has led to users finding new and interesting ways to communicate.
Character limits on texts and Tweets forced people to become inventive and innovative with language.
This saw the rise of things like ‘lol’ (laughing out loud and occasionally lots of love), ‘lmao’ (laughing my ass off) and ‘wuu2’ (what you up to?).

Speed

These abbreviations are also a quicker way to convey meaning and ultimately, ease of communication is the reason for the development of text talk (sometimes known as ‘txttlk’).
Here are what some linguists have said about texting:

Linguists 1

Shortis – texting shows creativity on the part of the texter.
Humphrys – hates texting. Says that it is “pillaging our punctuation, savaging our sentences and raping our vocabulary”.
Wood – investigated use of texting language and Standard English – found that there was no correlation between using it and using Standard English incorrectly.

Linguists 2

McWhorter – texting allows us to write the way that we speak and that this is a “linguistic miracle”.
Tagg – analysed text messages and found that it was more common to find spelling mistakes than text language.

Linguists 3

Cingle and Sundar – found that there was a strong negative correlation between use of text language and explicit understanding of grammar.
Lee – found that those who were more intensive in their use of texting language had a much smaller vocabulary.
Crystal – believes that texting is a sign of a ‘language in evolution’.

Informalisation

Linked to texting, we are also seeing a modern trend towards informalisation – a process of things becoming more informal.

Informalisation

Informalisation was an idea proposed by Goodman.
You can see this in places like colleges where staff are referred to by first names.

Colloquialisation

Linked in with this, Leech believes that there is a growing trend of colloquialisation – meaning that interactions are becoming more and more colloquial.
You can look at this when considering how you greet a friend when in town versus how someone 100 years ago would have greeted a friend in the street.

Lexical change

Language continues to change at an exceptional rate, however, it is important to note, as Algeo does, that this is almost always lexical change – changes to grammar and syntax takes many years (centuries).