The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English - Hardcover

Abley, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618571221 ISBN 13: 9780618571222

Verlag: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

An exhilarating exploration of how the world's languages are likely to transform and be transformed by their speakers

Mark Abley, author of Spoken Here, takes the reader on a global journey like no other—from Singapore to Tokyo, from Oxford to Los Angeles, through the Internet and back in time. As much a travel book as a tour of words at play, The Prodigal Tongue goes beyond grammar and vocabulary to discover how language is irrevocably changing the people of the world in far-reaching ways.
On his travels, Abley encounters bloggers, translators, novelists, therapists, dictionary makers, hip-hop performers, and Web-savvy teens. He talks to a married couple who corresponded passionately online before they met in “meatspace.” And he listens to teenagers, puzzling out the words they coin in chat rooms and virtual worlds.
Everywhere he goes, he asks what the future is likely to hold for the ways we communicate. Abley balances a traditional concern for honesty and accuracy in language with a less traditional delight in the sheer creative energy of new words and expressions.
Provocative, perceptive, and often hilarious, this is a book for everyone who cherishes the words we use.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Abley, an award-winning journalist, writes for the Montreal Gazette, the Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. He speaks English, French, and a little Welsh. His previous book, Spoken Here, was named a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Discover magazine. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 for work on language change and the future.

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Roarific
The Power of Language Change

Was I in Arcadia or Alhambra? Was I speeding past Temple City or City of
Industry?
Somewhere amid the grind and spurt of traffic on a southern
California freeway, I slipped a Coldplay disc, X&Y, into my car's CD player.
The morning sun lit up the distant, snow-clotted San Gabriel Mountains, a
prospect as exhilarating as the opening song, "Square One." As the lead
singer, Chris Martin, evoked discovery, travel and the future, his tenor voice
seemed to soar high above the choking swarm of vehicles; half consciously I
swerved into the fast lane. But Martin's tone soon darkens. Several of the
cuts demonstrate loss, regret, uncertainty, and apprehension about what the
days after tomorrow hold in store for us. An SUV was maintaining an
aggressive stance inches behind my license plate, and I pulled back into one
of the middle lanes.
The CD reached its fifth track: a haunting, nine-note melody,
repeated softly, then with a surge of percussive volume. Martin sings about
his fear of the future, his need to speak out. When an early attempt at
reassurance fails, he probes deeper, asking if "you," his brother, feel
incomplete or lost. The song is called "Talk." To the underlying rhythm of a
drummed heartbeat, its lyrics summon up an anxiety specific to words and
meaning: the feeling that other people are addressing him in a language
beyond his grasp. It's as though language has lost its ability to connect us—
as though we've misplaced a key that would allow us, somehow, to
understand what words have come to mean. Birds kept flying somewhere
above Walnut or Diamond Bar, but all utterance now seemed strange,
unfathomable. The guitar riffs swooped and rose to match the breathtaking,
lethal grandeur of the California freeways, yet the song's lyrics were bleak.
Back home in Montreal, I found myself continually listening to
X&Y. So were millions of other people in dozens of countries—this had been
the world's top-selling album in 2005. One day I came across a futuristic, B-
movie-like video of "Talk"; it showed the perplexed band trying to
communicate with a giant robot. A version of the video on the YouTube
website had been watched more than 442,000 times in the previous ten
months. Many hundreds of viewers had posted comments. Some of them
were brief, uninhibited love letters. ace this song iz wick id lol ace vid, wrote a
viewer from Britain. coldplay is the BEST!! added a thirteen-year-old Finn,
using a Japanese screen name. vid. is kind of err. but the song is roarific,
noted an American. A comment in English from China followed one in
Basque from Spain and one in Spanish from Botswana.
If I were more of a joiner, I might have signed up for the official
Coldplay.com online forum, which boasts tens of thousands of members. The
forum makes national borders immaterial—Latvians and Macedonians,
Indonesians and Peruvians, Israelis and Egyptians all belong. To them it
doesn't matter that the band consists of three Englishmen and a Scot
singing in a tongue that was once confined to part of an island off Europe's
coast. Now, wherever on the planet these fans happen to live, music
connects them. So does language. As long as they're willing to grope for
words in the accelerating global language that Coldplay speaks, the forum
gives all its members a chance to speak. Which is how the fifth song on X&Y
ends. Martin admits that things don't make sense any longer. But as the
melodies collapse around him, he invites us to talk.
All sorts of borders are collapsing now: social, economic, artistic,
linguistic. They can't keep up with the speed of our listening, of our speaking,
of our singing, of our traveling. Borders could hardly be less relevant on teen-
happy websites like Facebook and MySpace. That morning, a Canadian in
the exurbs of Los Angeles, I was listening to a British band while driving to
meet a Mexican-American professor who began a memoir in Argentina full of
sentences like this: "repente veo que ALL OF A SUDDEN, como right out of
nowhere, estoy headed for the freeway on-ramp." Routes are merging.
Languages are merging.
That professor celebrates a promiscuous, unruly mix of words.
But many people contemplate such a mix with annoyance and fear, emotions
they also feel about other kinds of language change, like the chatroom
abbreviations in those YouTube comments. When you first peer at the
weirdly spelled, lowercase fragments of speech, or listen to the staccato
interplay of tongues in major cities like LA, you may be fearful that everyone
else is talking in a language you don't speak. Is it mere unfamiliarity that
inspires such unease, or is it something deeper?
Language enables us to feel at home in everyday life. But of late,
language seems to have packed up its bags, slammed the door behind it,
and taken to the open road. That's where we find ourselves: on the move.
Every few days, if not every few hours, we become aware of a new word or
phrase speeding past us. There's no going back, either—no retreat into the
grammar and lexicon of the past. Our only home is this: the verbal space in
which we're already traveling. The expressions in that space are often
amazing— a generation or two ago, before our use of language went digital,
no one would have believed some of what we routinely see, hear and type.
Yet from time to time, I too feel lost. In the future, wherever we
are, what in the world will we say?

* * *

The way other people use language sometimes troubles us. But the reasons
vary wildly. It may be the particular version of English spoken in Singapore,
Sydney or San Diego. It may be the way teenagers talk—Joan Didion,
describing the "blank-faced" girls and "feral" boys of southern California,
criticized their "refusal or inability to process the simplest statement without
rephrasing it. There was the fuzzy relationship to language, the tendency to
seize on a drifting fragment of something once heard and repeat it, not quite
get it right, worry it like a bone." It may be a pompously inflated polysyllabic
phrase, a contortion of words in an ad, a noun that masquerades as a verb. It
may be grammatical errors in a TV news bulletin, phrases abused on a radio
talk show, spelling mistakes on a website. It may be the opaque language of
bureaucracy—in March 2007, to take a random example, the Queensland
Government Chief Information Office defined its task as "the development of
methodologies and toolkits to strengthen the planning and project
management capability of agencies." Say what? "The QGCIO also plays an
integral part in building relationships and identifying opportunities for
collaboration between agencies, cross-jurisdictionally, with the ICT Industry
and with the tertiary sector." Even more than this kind of flaccid verbiage, my
personal bugbear is the rhetoric of war, engineered to hide the
truth: "collateral damage," "friendly fire," "transfer tubes," or "the excesses of
human nature that humanity suffers" (such was Donald Rumsfeld's
euphemism for the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib). There are
innumerable reasons why people get irritated about language.
Irritation can lead to anxiety. If words no longer bear their proper
meaning, or are no longer pronounced the right way, or are now being
combined with other words in some incorrect manner, what verbal
defacements might scar the future?
Experts keep trying to reassure the public. Even in 1929, the
British linguist Ernest Weekley felt it necessary to observe that "stability in
language is synonymous with rigor mortis." "People have been complaining
about language change for centuries," says Katherine Barber, editor in chief
of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary. "They're fascinated to learn that 'travel'
started off as an instrument of torture—but they want the changes to stop
now. I think people invest a lot in correct spelling and grammar because they
worked very hard to learn it well in school—that's why there's a resistance.
They say, 'It's terrible, they don't use the subjunctive anymore.' But the
subjunctive has been disappearing for centuries." As the American scholar
John McWhorter has pointed out, "There is no such thing as a society
lapsing into using unclear or illogical speech—anything that strikes you as
incorrect in some humble speech variety is bound to pop up in full bloom in
several of the languages considered the world's noblest." Nobility, the
linguists reiterate, is in the ear of the beholder. Many native speakers beg to
differ.
Amid the commotion, rest assured: I have no ideological ax to
grind. I'm not interested in persuading you to refine your punctuation, double
your vocabulary or perfect your grammar. I write simply as someone who
loves and cares about language; I believe its manifold powers of expression
help make us truly human. Today the evidence of linguistic change, like that
of climate change, is all around us. But I suspect that with both words and
weather, we don't always ask the right questions. "Is language declining?"
may not be the smartest inquiry to make. It might be more rewarding to
ask: "Why does language change provoke such anxiety? What kinds of
change can we expect to see in the future? And how should we try to cope?"
More than two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Horace
compared words to leaves in a forest: just as trees lose their withered leaves
and welcome fresh ones, so too do words fall away to be replaced by the
new. The process is continual, and older than any of our languages. Yet
words seem unusually volatile now. "We are living at the beginning of a new
linguistic era," the eminent linguist David Crystal wrote in 2004. "I do not
believe that 'revolution' is too strong a word for what has been taking place."
He based his assertion on three interrelated phenomena: the planetwide
spread of English in the late twentieth century, the disappearance of
hundreds of other languages, and the sudden dominance of the Internet as a
means of communication. When these topics are looked at together, Crystal
argued, "we encounter a vision of a linguistic future which is radically different
from what has existed in the past."
The nature of that difference is the central theme of these pages.
Having devoted a previous book, Spoken Here, to the last-ditch struggles of
minority languages, I promise to say little about that subject here. The
awareness of a terrible loss—on average, a language goes extinct
somewhere in the world every two weeks—underlies some of what follows.
But loss is not the only story to be told. This book sets out to explore and
interpret a verbal revolution.

* * *

On a bright October afternoon, I was standing in front of a class of sixteen
and seventeen-year-olds in a small town west of Montreal. Their English
teacher had invited me to give a writing workshop in the high school library.
The hour was nearing its end when abruptly I switched course. Instead of
talking about metaphors and similes, sweet conclusions and dynamite
beginnings, I asked each student to jot down a few words or phrases that
older people would not understand, and then provide a brief definition for each
term. I gave the class no advance warning. The risk was that this impromptu
assignment would induce a yawn-filled silence, a retreat into heavy-lidded
boredom. But instead the students—especially the girls, I noticed—set about
the task with enthusiasm.
"You mean any words?" said a preppy-looking girl in blue. "Even
the ones that aren't in the dictionary?"
"Especially the ones that aren't in a dictionary," I replied.
I waited a couple of minutes—time was short—and asked for the
results. Arms filled the air. Hands waggled. I'm a reader, a parent, a viewer, a
listener; I thought that all together, the students might come up with a dozen
words I didn't know. So much for the vanity of age.
Cheddar, said the first, meaning "money, lavish earnings." (I'll give
this and all the other definitions in the students' exact words.) He got owned,
said another: "rejected, shut down, beat up." On the go, added a third: "it's
like going out, but not official." I recognized some of the expressions, of
course; even a senior citizen of fifty can comprehend eye candy and loaded,
poser and flame. Did these innocent, cool teenagers really believe their
generation had invented high? But as I stood there in the sun-dappled library,
I realized that the majority of the students' words and phrases left me
bemused. What on earth was burninate? Was d-low somehow related
to "below," "delay," "J Lo"—or to none of those terms? (Not wanting to keep
the meanings secret—to d-low them, that is—I'll suggest that you'd burninate
something only if you had the fire-breathing powers of a dragon.) More
generally, by what learned or instinctive command had these young people
enacted their self-assured takeover of the language?
Before the bell freed them from the joy of learning, the students
handed in the slips of paper on which they'd scribbled their definitions. I have
them still: scraps torn from notepads and workbooks, a page from a
disintegrating paperback, a yellow Post-it note with a smiley at the top.
Overlaps were surprisingly rare; just one word—noob, meaning somebody
new, ignorant or inexperienced—was defined three times.
Looking at the sixty-six words now, I'm struck by the diversity of
their origins. A few emerge from the online world of instant messaging: rofl,
for instance, which gathers the initial letters of "rolling on the floor laughing."
Others are abbreviations: sup, for instance, originally "What's up?" and now a
synonym for "Hi, how are you?" Almost anywhere you go, the power of hip-
hop seems unavoidable: surely that's how homie (friend) and foshizzle (I
agree) migrated from America's inner cities to a small, waspish town in
Quebec. Hip-hop and cyberspace together encouraged the spread of phat,
which morphed from "sexy" in the 1960s to "cool, great, wonderful" by
the '90s, and which is now widely regarded as an acronym for "pretty hot and
tempting"—its original meaning, in short. Drug culture is just as influential;
blame or credit it for fatty (an oversized joint), gacked (on speed) and pinner
(a small joint). It's unfortunate That's so gay has come to mean "That's
stupid, not worth my time." But what could be the origins and adolescent
meanings of lag and One and die in a fire?
It was humbling to read an impromptu definition of scene, a word I
thought I knew, that deployed a word I couldn't quite pin down—"style (knock-
off of emo)." Emo? It was even more humbling for me, a writer, someone
whose livelihood depends on the rich and exact use of words, to realize how
far the English language had slithered away from my grasp, not for reasons of
ethnicity or culture but simply because of time. "But at my back I always
hear / Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near," wrote the poet Andrew Marvell in
the seventeenth century. It's not a chariot any longer; it's a Dreamliner.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that all these expressions are
destined to enter the permanent storehouse of English vocabulary. Many of
them will be as fleeting as youth itself. Young men and women have always
used slang as a weapon to cut their lives free from the nets cast by their
elders— didn't I aspire, unsuccessfully, to be a groovy freak? Older people
have no reason to try and memorize the throwaway lexicon of the young. But
the cascade of teenage slang I faced that afternoon can stand as a symbol of
the astonishing rate at which new words are pouring into English. Nobody
can control this breakbeat language; nobody can even keep track of it.
The language is both inherently permissive and amazingly
powerful. Yet while it soaks up terms from dozens of foreign cultures and
nations, English also infiltrates and penetrates most of the world's other
languages. Worry about the linguistic future is nothing unique to English-
speakers. People around the world are struggling with verbal shock: angst
about how we speak, how we read and write, the changing ways we
communicate. Perhaps all this helps to explain why so many are convinced
that language is deteriorating. It's as though—regardless of whether the
supposed peak of eloquence was attained in the era of Shakespeare, Goethe
or Proust—the language of the twenty-first century must inevitably mark a
sad decline in accuracy, grace or both. Nervousness about falling standards
makes us resort to grammar hotlines and seek the stern advice of language
mavens. Google the phrase "proper grammar," and you'll find, as of November
2007, no fewer than 394,000 hits.
If technological innovations are usually cheered, linguistic
innovations just as commonly come under attack. A few years ago Prince
Charles attacked the "corrupting" effect of American English, saying, "People
tend to invent all sorts of nouns and verbs and make words that shouldn't be.
I think we have to be a bit careful; otherwise the whole thing can get rather a
mess." His late compatriot Alistair Cooke bemoaned "the disastrous de- cline
in the teaching of elementary grammar." But is language really in a state of
free fall? Are speakers in the future condemned to be messier and less
accurate than ourselves?

* * *

It's easy for me to say that words are evolving fast. But I need to prove the
point. So let's perform a brief test. If you look back at the eleven paragraphs
you've just read, describing my visit to a high school—and if you leave aside
all the students' new expressions (noob, foshizzle, sup and so on)— you'll
still find at least thirty words and usages that did not appear in the first
edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1884–1928), the most ambitious and
scholarly effort yet made to assemble a complete record of the language.
Some of these terms are obvious: Google, hip-hop and instant messaging
were all born in the late twentieth century. So, slightly earlier, were Post-its
and smileys. According to John Ayto's book Twentieth Century
Words, "hotline" is believed to date back to 1955, "online" to 1950.More
subtle, more thought-provoking, are recent coinages that evoke not
technological inventions but concepts and ideas. The creators of the OED
had no knowledge of "takeover," a word that appeared only in the mid-1940s,
nor "permissive," a 1950s term, nor "inner city," a phrase from
1968. "Ethnicity" dates from 1953; one particular ethnicity, "wasp" (meaning
white Anglo-Saxon Protestant), had been around for centuries, although the
word remained absent from the language until 1962.
The list goes on. "Senior citizen" arrived in 1938, a year
after "workshop" began to signify something more than just a room full of
tools. "Angst," understandably, seems to have become an English word
during the Second World War. Another wartime invention was "acronym."
Both angst and acronyms have proliferated since. "Throwaway" was
unavailable to the OED's first editors; so was "cool," except as a term
evoking temperature. Even "insecure," in its common usage, arose only in the
1930s. Most surprising—given the ubiquity and apparent necessity of the
term—the word "teenager" was not born until the early 1940s. "I never knew
teen-agers could be so serious," declared a writer for Popular Science
Monthly in 1941. The first verifiable use of "teenage" goes back another
generation, to (of all places) Victoria, British Columbia, where a 1921 article
in the Daily Colonist declared: "All 'teen age' girls of the city are cordially
invited to attend the mass meeting to be held this evening." The OED's staff
had already finished work on the letter T by then, so anybody looking
up "teenage" in the great dictionary is in for a shock: it's defined as a country
term meaning brushwood for fences and hedges.
In 1921 few people outside the Victoria area would ever read the
Daily Colonist. A copy took days to reach the East Coast, weeks to travel
overseas. Today the Times Colonist, like almost every other newspaper,
maintains a lively presence on the Internet. With some clicks of a mouse,
anybody who has access to a computer can learn about the city, keep up
with its goings on, or send aggrieved letters to the editor. Thanks to
technology, you don't have to live in Victoria to stay abreast of the Victoria
news. Besides, the growth of immigration, cheap air travel and a global
economy means that no English-speaking city in the world is ethnically
homogeneous. I used to believe this wide dispersal of readers and speakers
would encourage a uniformity of language—a smoothing out of differences.
Even if a few slang expressions varied from place to place, surely the
varieties of English were destined to become ever more similar.
Now I'm not so sure. Admittedly, many dialects and accents have
faded over time—as long ago as 1962, in Travels with Charley, John
Steinbeck lamented the decline of American regional speech. The little town
of Lunenberg in southern Nova Scotia was settled by Swiss and German
immigrants in the eighteenth century, and until recently dozens of German-
based expressions could be heard in the
area: "struddle," "mawger," "gookemole," "wackelass" and so on. Few of
these terms, unfortunately, remain in daily use. Most of them have joined the
silent, ever-growing army of lost words.
Yet robust dialects still flourish. Many people in Scotland, for
instance, are convinced that their daily idiom, Scots, is so different from
mainstream English that it should count as a separate tongue. In 2006 some
portions of Trawlermen, a BBC-TV miniseries about fishermen off a coastal
town in Scotland, had to be subtitled before being shown elsewhere in the
United Kingdom. Matthew Fitt, a young writer appointed by the Scottish
government to serve as National Schools Scots Language Development
Officer, has written poems in which lines I can figure out ("be guid tae yirsel")
are followed by lines I find totally incomprehensible ("sic a drochle / a
peeliewally"). Fitt invents words on occasion—"cyberjanny" was his coinage
for a virtual concierge who made an appearance in a Scots cyberpunk novel—
but more often he simply puts into writing the everyday idiom of Scottish
people. Their accent can be so distinctive that many common words—"guid,"
for instance—look weird in standard English spelling, like a fullback in a tutu.
If you wander down the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, you'll pass a six-
floor apartment building (a block of flats, I mean) on which a historic-looking
plaque is kitted out with flags and emblems. But the plaque is far from old.
The wording on it reads: al this wark was begun be dancon on 10 January
1989 and endit be them on 31 March 1990. The use of Scots on the plaque
makes a strong cultural and political statement. Part of its meaning is that, in
the face of the rampantly global, Scottish people are determined to value and
promote the local. Yet every vibrant dialect, not just Scots, generates new
expressions; and these expressions can get in the way of a shared
understanding. Think of all the acronyms that speak volumes to insiders and
say nothing to everyone else. TTC, for instance. If you're a sports fan, you
probably associate those initials with The Tennis Channel. Unless you're a
sports fan living in Toronto, in which case you'd first call to mind the Toronto
Transit Commission. Anyone moving to the city finds TTC an essential trio of
letters to figure out. In the American South, the letters also involve
transportation: Trans-Texas Corridor. But in Paris, TTC is a hip-hop band; in
Singapore, South Carolina, Essex and Oklahoma it refers to a college (four
different colleges, that is); and in Wellington, New Zealand, it signifies the
Tararua Tramping Club. ("Tramping" means hiking, if you're American, or
rambling, if you're British.) The initials also belong to a European research
project, Timing, Trigger and Control, whose website helpfully notes: "The TTC
system was initially developed by RD12, an LHC Common Project financed
by EP and SL Divisions and the four LHC experiment collaborations." TTC, in
short, has dozens of disconnected meanings around the world.
For a stranger, mastering the language of a new place means
getting to know its initials as well as its cultural and political references. And
countries, like cities, have their own allusions, their own illusions. The
playwright George Bernard Shaw once quipped that the USA and Britain are
divided by a common language. It might be more accurate to say they're
united by a different language. North Americans traveling in Britain would be
well advised to realize that "randy" means what they know as "horny";
otherwise they could be as baffled as a Chicago girl I once met in a Glasgow
youth hostel who couldn't fathom the reaction she caused by walking up to
boys and saying, "Hi, I'm Randi."
Teenagers in London are less and less likely to speak in the
traditional Cockney accent, but they're not switching over to the Queen's
English, nor even to the Estuary English adopted by their parents and older
siblings. Instead, many of them use a new transcultural idiom that goes by
the name "Jafaikan." Besides the obvious Caribbean source, it draws on
accents and words from Africa, South Asia and Australia. "Safe, man," wrote
a Guardian journalist in a piece entitled "Learn Jafaikan in two minutes." "You
lookin buff in dem low batties. Dey's sick, man. Me? I'm just jammin wid me
bruds. Dis my yard, innit? Is nang, you get me?" Migration is a fact of
language. Now that the peoples of the world jam with their bruds on each
other's doorstep, it may be necessary to understand the differences between,
say, a hijab and a niqab, a khemar and a chador. In large cities, isolation
from other cultures is impossible. The more we mix, the more we match. And
just as our words keep flooding into other languages, some of their words
inevitably seep into ours. English has already adopted terms from at least
350 other tongues, including Choctaw, Twi, Nootka and Araucanian.
Languages change when a minority people asserts itself as
strongly as Jamaicans in Britain and Algerians in France have recently done.
There's nothing new or alarming about this; Jewish immigrants to the United
States a century ago had the chutzpah to make Yiddish a rich source of
English expressions. Languages alter too when sheer proximity forces
idioms to rub up against each other—to share a physical space is also to
share a verbal space. In Montreal, English- and French-speakers routinely
and genially wreak havoc on each other's languages. Soon after a collapsing
overpass had killed several people, I heard a Quebec official say on English
language radio: "Circulation on Autoroute Dix-neuf will have a little
perturbation." In other words, traffic on Highway 19 will be chaotic.

* * *

Technological change can add to our verbal unease. On a trip to New York in
2006 I happened to pass a notice board at the entrance to East Green, a
quiet area of Central Park, that still told passersby: "Earphones are required
for listening to radios and tapeplayers." The sign became outmoded as soon
as the Discman and MiniDisc Walkman replaced the portable cassette
player. In an era of iPods and MP3 players, the notice makes even less
sense. The word "tapeplayers," once so shiny, bears the scuff marks of age.
To keep up with technology, the notice board would require a fresh noun
every few years.
Over the next few decades, advances in technology will bring us a
megaload of gleaming words. But more important, the whole feel and, so to
speak, headspace of the future will be unlike anything we can foretell. Words
don't just give names to devices, they give flesh to ideas. Apart from the
multitude of fresh vocabulary that speakers in 2100 will take for granted, and
the subtly different threads of grammar that will knit their words together, it's
likely they will pronounce the language in different ways than we do. The
sounds and rhythms of English, French and many other languages have
undergone substantial change within the past century.
To hear exactly how a language alters, we're lucky that the New
Zealand Broadcasting Service sent mobile recording units around the country
in 1946. The units had previously gathered soldiers' and nurses' wartime
messages to their families at home. After the outbreak of peace, New
Zealand decided to record the music being performed in outlying areas as
well as the reminiscences of old-timers living there. "The recordings were
made on fourteen-inch acetate disks," the linguist Margaret Maclagan
explained to Australia's Radio National, "which were so soft that they didn't
actually want to play them very often, so most of the people who were
recorded never even heard themselves. They made the recordings in people's
homes, or on farms or in the local town halls." Surprisingly, perhaps, the
music proved less popular than the stories, and so the mobile units went
back on the road for another two years, harvesting the voices of more than
three hundred people.
Why is this of any interest now? Because New Zealand English is
a young dialect. Other varieties of English, from North America and the
Caribbean to India, South Africa and Australia, were already well established
by the second half of the nineteenth century, when most of these speakers
were born. They are, Maclagan explained, "the first generation of European
people born in New Zealand. So they're the very first people who ended up
speaking New Zealand English." This means, unusually, that almost the
entire history of the dialect exists in recorded form.
Radio National played the voices of a brother and sister, a Mr. and
Miss Bannatyne, who were small children in South Island in the 1890s. Their
given names appear to be lost. Even in the late 1940s, Mr. Bannatyne spoke
in what sounded very much like an English accent; he would have
pronounced the word "fish" with a vowel sound recognizable to English-
speakers elsewhere. But Miss Bannatyne pursed her mouth and swallowed
her short i's: fsh, she would have said. That's one of the most noticeable
qualities of a New Zealand accent. She had it. He didn't.
What the New Zealand researchers found in those 1940s
recordings holds true elsewhere. Women take on a new accent faster than
men (this matters not only for its own sake, but also because mothers
traditionally play the largest role in passing on language to children). People
from a lower social class acquire a new accent more quickly than those from
a higher class. And accents develop most quickly when people from many
different places mix together. The more social flux and tumult there are in a
community, the more likely its language is to alter. New Zealanders were
fortunate to acquire their distinctive accent without rancor. In many countries
today, mobility and social mixing have never been greater, and language can
change with startling abruptness.
Even so, some kinds of change happen gracefully. Let's consider
Somalia for a moment. It's hard to think of a nation more profoundly stricken
by war, famine, displacement and ecological collapse. Somali culture,
traditionally nomadic, was reliant on camel herding, and the decline of that
practice has heightened the people's vulnerability to the ever more frequent
droughts that plague the Horn of Africa. Over the centuries, the Somali
language developed an astonishing range of words to embody a herding
culture—golqaniinyo, for instance, meaning "a bite given on a camel's flank to
render her docile during milking"; or uusmiiro, "to extract water from a
camel's stomach to drink during a period of drought." What's striking is the
confident way in which Somalis have taken their old came-lrelated words and
applied them to new purposes.
Their use of language is dynamic. Guree, for example, once
meant "to make room for a person to sit on a loaded camel." Now it refers to
making space for someone in a full car or truck. More radically, gulguuluc
used to mean "the low bellow of a sick or thirsty camel," but today the word
applies to a poem recited in a low voice. Haneed once signified "the left side
of a cow camel where one stands when milking." Its meaning has stretched
to the point where the term now suggests good form or style. Yet the
stretching is a natural evolution, nothing forced or jagged. If English would
only change as elegantly as the Somali words for camel culture, few people
would have a serious objection.
Fat chance. In today's world many hundreds of millions of people
speak English as a foreign language, with greater or lesser success. (One of
them, translating an Israeli tourist brochure into English, recently turned a
Hebrew phrase meaning "Jerusalem—there's no city like it" into "Jerusalem—
there's no such city.") As their language lunges off into uncharted territory,
native speakers often resent the bewildering, graceless changes they have
witnessed since childhood. Can English still be ours if we don't know a phat
from a fatty? If we respect traditional rules of spelling and grammar, will we
soon be owned?
People with a different mother tongue are less likely to feel an
intuitive bond to the particular version of English they learned. But they too
can be upset by language change, especially if its effect is to make English
seem even less straightforward, even harder to comprehend. Non-native
speakers of the language far outnumber those for whom this is the tongue of
earliest memory. And the future of English, some linguists now suggest, will
depend heavily on those who did not speak it in their childhood.

* * *

I will have much to say in this book about the exhilaration that language
change provokes, the creativity it embodies. But it can also be deeply
problematic. It can leave older people voiceless in their own tongue. It can
create havoc for lawyers, teachers, police officers and other professionals. It
can divide a community. And what of the cultural loss it incites? The
dramatic influx of new words into the language has left no room for thousands
of old ones, which beat a quiet retreat into portly dictionaries and half-
forgotten classics. Even the hardy survivor words carry meanings that swell
or shrink over time.
The result, often, is confusion. We may think we know what a
sentence or a paragraph means, but we can easily be deceived. When a
language slams its foot down on the accelerator, the past shrinks and blurs
in the rear-view mirror. Much of the difficulty we have in understanding the
past is semantic—if its language consistently eludes us, so does its spirit,
its psychology. The attempt to read any text from a bygone century can, in
Coldplay's words, make us "feel like they're talking in a language I don't
speak." And as history becomes unintelligible, we lose touch with the roots
of culture.
Consider a few lines from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer,
still being used in many churches in the twenty-first century. Some of its
wording goes back nearly half a millennium, to a time before William
Shakespeare was born. I remember, as a boy, being puzzled by the
invitation "Come unto me, all that travail and are heavy laden, and I will
refresh you." Did I travail? Would I be refreshed? A few moments later, the
priest declared Jesus to be "the propitiation for our sins." The what? That
verse was prefaced by the command "Hear what comfortable words our
Saviour Christ saith unto all that truly turn to him." There the language floored
us —not just me, but also the vast majority of worshipers. For "comfortable"
doesn't mean what we naturally assumed it did; it means, to quote the
Oxford English Dictionary, "strengthening or supporting." That dictionary gives
a dozen meanings for "comfortable"; nine of them were obsolete a century
ago.
The Anglican prayer book employs the word in a geriatric sense
that could only mislead contemporary readers. It's a good thing the book
doesn't also—as far as I know—feature manure and commodes. To manure
meant to manage or cultivate, which is why an Elizabethan author could say
that England was "governed, administered and manured by three sorts of
persons." And a commode, when it sauntered into the language, was a tall
headdress worn by fashionable women. Hence an otherwise inexplicable
couplet by the minor poet Edward Ward: "Stiff commodes in triumph stared /
Above their foreheads half a yard."
More recent texts also run up against the shifting nature of
language. As a university student, I learned a few favorite poems by heart.
One of them was "Lapis Lazuli" by the Irish author William Butler Yeats. Its
subject is the magnificent persistence of art in times of pain and horror.
Written in the mid-1930s, as Europe lurched toward war, "Lapis Lazuli" is, I
would still argue, one of the key poems of the last century. But, because of
language change, it's a poem that has become hard to enjoy—even, for
young people, to take seriously.
When the aging Yeats wrote, "Two Chinamen, behind them a
third, / Are carved in lapis lazuli," he didn't know how offensive the
term "Chinaman" would become (except in the game of cricket, where it
continues to refer to a particular type of delivery from a left-armed spin
bowler).When Yeats said, "Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out, / Pitch like
King Billy bomb-balls in," he couldn't predict that zeppelins would soon be a
historical relic, even more antiquated than the expression "bomb-balls. "When
he used the phrases "hysterical women" and "all men have aimed at," he
didn't know that feminists would dismiss such wording as sexist—his "men"
refers to human beings, not just to adult males. And when the poet
declared, "All things fall and are built again, / And those that build them again
are gay," he wanted to evoke a brave insouciance in the face of grief. He
certainly wasn't thinking about Judy Garland albums and rainbow bumper
stickers.
As a euphemism or proud substitute for "homosexual," the
word "gay" became widespread only in the 1960s. Its origins stretch back
much further, perhaps to the Victorian era—although a 1942 Thesaurus of
American Slang gives no hint of its current meaning, which spawned the
derisive usage I encountered among high school students. Cole Porter could
have had no clue about the adjective's future destiny when in 1932 he entitled
a musical Gay Divorce. In "Lapis Lazuli," Yeats used "gay" four times,
making it the poem's central word. But if you're a contemporary reader who
has grown up equating gay with homosexual, you'll have a hard time
forgetting the familiar meaning. The line "They know that Hamlet and Lear are
gay" could well evoke an unwanted image of certain actors; and the poem's
slow, resounding conclusion—"Their eyes, their ancient, glittering eyes, are
gay"—verges on the ridiculous.
So far I've been speaking about the vocabulary of the past. But
there's another difficulty: its syntax. The sentences we fashion today tend to
be a lot shorter than they were in previous centuries, when authors were
normally intimate with the rotund cadences of Latin and when they wrote out
their texts by hand. Yeats grew up in the nineteenth century.His early
readers had no telephones, no radios, no TV sets, no computers—the list of
what they didn't have is almost endless. But they did have one thing most of
us lack: time. They didn't need to hurry their reading. They didn't gobble
sentences like mouthfuls of fast food.
And so they expected, even welcomed ornately sculpted phrases.
They were at ease with sentences so complex that the syntax resembles
architecture, and with a formal register of language that strikes most of us
today as puffed up. To the great reformer William Wilberforce, a hundred-word
sentence was merely routine. One of his finest pieces of writing—An Appeal
to the Religion, Justice, and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British
Empire, in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies—was published in
London in 1823. A typical sentence begins like this: "For then, on the general
ground merely of the incurable injustice and acknowledged evils of slavery,
aggravated, doubtless, by the consideration that it was a slavery forcibly
opposed on unoffending men for our advantage . . ."
He hasn't got to the main verb yet. He hasn't even got to the
subject.
Wilberforce's lifelong struggle against slavery is the subject of
Michael Apted's 2007 film Amazing Grace. The good characters in the movie
say straightforward things like "To hell with caution!" and "Remember, God
made men equal" and "If there's a bad taste in your mouth, spit it out." The
evil characters speak pompously: "We have no evidence that the Africans
themselves have any objection to the trade. "We can't be sure, of course,
exactly how Wilberforce talked; in conversation he's unlikely to have waited
more than thirty words before reaching the subject of a sentence. It's clear,
even so, that the film makes his enemies speak in an idiom reasonably true
to the age—whereas Wilberforce, to appear heroic in our eyes, talks like us.
We mistrust oratory. We like our heroes plainspoken.
Reading the past, we often stumble over the words we encounter.
The words that are missing may be just as significant. Although Huck Finn is
an adolescent boy, Mark Twain never conceived of him as a "teenager," for
teenagers had not yet, so to speak, been invented. Oscar Wilde was
undoubtedly a pederast, but how much sense does it make to call him gay?
If we do so, we pluck him out of the nineteenth century and deposit him in
ours. People in the past lived free of concepts from our own time, just as we
walk around in blithe ignorance of ideas that will seem self-evident to our
grandchildren. Those ideas will rely on words that have not yet been born.

* * *

And then there's Shakespeare, the supreme cultural icon for writers and
readers of English. Without knowing it, we repeat his words every day of our
lives; they've become part of the fabric of our mental life. Brevity is the soul of
wit, but if there's method in my madness, it might be too much of a good
thing to lay it on with a trowel—there you have four Shakespearean phrases
in half a sentence. He was an avid punster and word coiner too: the
adjectives "vulnerable," "laughable," "barefaced" and "well-bred" all sprang to
life in his plays. (So did "critic" as a noun and "puke" as a verb.) Knowledge of
his work has often been considered essential to a humane education.
Yet in some eyes that notion betrays insufferable elitism. "It
seems there are two kinds of people out there," the playwright and theater
director Kim Selody told me: "those who were taught the plays in such a way
that they knew what they were about, and those like me who somehow
missed the story. Those that know the stories are in a club. I remember
being in grade ten and studying Macbeth. We were asked to read the play on
our own. The teacher jumped to the poetry and metaphors and allusions. I
never really knew what the hell was going on. By the time I got to theater
school and college, I was too embarrassed to admit that I really didn't know
the stories and would just fake it." There are, Selody is convinced, countless
fakers.
In the late 1980s, by then an established writer for young people,
he took the plots of The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Twelfth
Night and adapted them for children. A play called Suddenly Shakespeare
was the result. "The main question I was responding to was 'What the heck
is going on?' I purposely chose modern, simple language for the storytellers."
But his choice of words gave rise to dissent: "Some of those in the club felt I
was ruining the poetry of his work. This was a conscious choice on my part,
because it was the poetry and allusions that had kept the story hidden from
me."
Actors can work small miracles to get some of Shakespeare's
meaning across, even when a word has fallen out of use—"the multitudinous
seas incarnadine" becomes a bit less puzzling on the lips of a good
Macbeth. But no performer conveys the exact rhymes that Shakespeare
intended: in his day, "meet" and "mate," "see" and "say" were homonyms.
And an actor's hardest challenge comes when very common words have
altered in meaning. Addressing Ariel in act four of The Tempest, Prospero
tells the sprite: "So, with good life / And observation strange, my meaner
ministers / Their several kinds have done." None of those words are unusual.
But do you have any clue what he's talking about? In that brief
passage, "life," "strange," "meaner," "ministers," "several" and "kinds" all mean
something different to Prospero than they do to you and me. To avoid such
perplexity, many theater directors turn the Bard into slapstick, forcing their
actors to ham up every speech with overblown gestures and endless bits of
stage business. Shakespeare's plays and poems have, in truth, become
profoundly foreign to most speakers of his own language. The same fate has
befallen the work of his contemporary Miguel de Cervantes (they died a few
days apart in April 1616), perhaps the greatest writer in Spanish. "For most
readers," the Hispanic scholar Orlando Alba told me, "it is very difficult
(maybe impossible) to read and understand the original version of El Quijote.
What students read in school is in fact a 'translation' to modern Spanish."
The difficulties occur in both the vocabulary and the grammar. Cervantes has
been left behind by the language he did so much to shape and by readers
who remain in his debt. Similarly, audiences who watch Shakespeare's plays
in a foreign language are liable to have a lot more fun than audiences who
battle to decipher his English. The rapid pace of language change is making
it harder and harder to produce his work in a way that an English-speaking
crowd can comprehend.
Difficult, but maybe not impossible. "You don't need to do
slapstick to make Shakespeare come alive," Leslee Silverman insists. "What
you need to find is the emotional meaning behind the words. That hasn't
changed." Silverman, who has achieved wonders as the artistic director of
Manitoba Theatre for Young People, believes that "what the kids are hard-
wired to feel is a response to the despair, to the compassion, to the big
stories that are in language." When her company put on Romeo and Juliet in
2001, "we gave it the eye candy—a fashion walkway, with the kids on the
one side being Montagues, the kids on the other side Capulets. "Dressed in
club gear, they danced to loud funk music. But apart from adding a little
slang— the friar, realizing that Juliet had swallowed poison, blurted "Holy
jumpin' Jesus!"—the production didn't mess around with the language. Why
not? asked a local critic. "If the stage was modern, the costumes were
modern and the music was modern, then why wasn't the English? Perhaps
the contemporary pizzazz was for the kids and the diction meant to appeal to
the cultural desires of the parents. Either way, this was the only
shortcoming." But for many, it was a shortcoming that effectively ruined the
experience. "The children around me," the critic noted, "had a hard time
understanding what was going on."
To Kim Selody, "language and its use is clearly the issue. Those
parts of Shakespeare's writings that have fallen out of use today create a
barrier to understanding the story." If we value the stories, we may have to
detach them from Shakespeare's spectacular words. That's a painful task.
But when Selody is asked to justify his rewriting of the Bard, he reminds his
critics that a child in a North American city now may well be somebody
who "speaks English as a second language and whose cultural history is the
Ramayana epic poem. I always like to ask those who are in the club, 'Do you
know the story of the Ramayana?'"

* * *

Most of this book will examine language change as it affects English,
although these pages will also have a good deal to say about Japanese and
French. Yet the dilemmas that beset English seldom afflict English alone.
The world's most prominent languages are all in a state of flux. Let's take a
quick look at another tongue caught between the weight of tradition and the
demands of the new: Arabic.
Of the world's six thousand or so languages, Arabic and Hebrew
appear to have the most invested in stability. Devout Muslims, like Orthodox
Jews, believe their sacred texts are the immutable word of God. Christians,
by contrast, read the Bible in translation, and their scriptures are subject to
remorseless updating—in a twenty-first-century version from Australia, the
Virgin Mary is described as a "pretty special sheila" who gives birth to "God's
toddler." But in Islam, nobody can alter what God has said. Some Arabic
texts from what we call the Middle Ages suggested that errors in language
were also errors in morality—grounds, in fact, for damnation. So is Arabic
immune to change? After all, the language of the Qur'an—fusha, to use its
proper name—"is also the written language of classical Arabic literature, as
well as the language of officialdom throughout Arab and Islamic history to this
modern day."
The words are those of Issa Boullata, a distinguished Palestinian
scholar of the Qur'an. Its text was written down—having been, in believers'
eyes, revealed to the Prophet through the angel Gabriel—in what we call the
seventh century. The fusha has provided a linguistic model ever since, one
that is now heard daily on radio and television as well as in mosques and
schools. Dubai even sponsors a lucrative competition, held each year during
the sacred month of Ramadan, when boys and young men fromaround the
world attempt to recite the 77,000 or so words of the Qur'an from memory,
devoid of error or hesitation. Thanks to the fusha, Boullata explains, "if Arabs
from different countries meet today, they will be able to speak in classical
Arabic and have full understanding, especially in formal situations."
Yet time has transformed the language's very syntax. Most
sentences in the classical tongue—the language of the Qur'an—follow a verb-
subject-object order. But in daily life, the majority of Arabic-speakers now do
what we do, and put the subject first. Not that they place much value on their
everyday speech; most of them ascribe high value only to a form of the
language that has been static for 1,300 years. They understand classical
Arabic, they revere it, they love it—and they rarely hold a conversation in it. "If
each person speaks in his or her own dialect," Boullata adds, "they will still
understand each other, but sometimes with humorous misunderstandings."
The confusion shows that in spite of the Qur'an's majestic presence, Arabic
has undergone dramatic change.
Stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, it has a
host of spoken dialects, some of which enjoy much higher prestige than
others. The wealthy citizens of Beirut, for example, have tended to look down
their noses at the accent of Palestinian refugees. Bedouins, villagers and city
dwellers pronounce Arabic in different ways, often using different words to do
so. So when pan-Arabic TV networks like al-Jazeera give voice to the
colloquial language, they have to be careful not to confound their audience.
Jokes and songs from one region of the Arabic-speaking world may be
unfathomable in another.
Arabic has always been willing to accept a modicum of foreign
words. For every al-jabr it gave to Europe, a faylasuf would arrive in return
(think "algebra," think "philosopher"). But since the early twentieth century,
Boullata says, new inventions and scientific words "have been coming at
such a fast speed that it was not easy always to find new Arabic terms, and
people often resorted to adopting the foreign terms. So you have telefon,
telefizion, teleghram, etc." Some of the borrowings led to innovations: to
make a phone call in Arabic is talfana. Journalists were often the first to coin
a word "because they needed to describe new inventions quickly to the
readers; hence sarukh for rocket, for example. Sarukh was derived from the
verb sarakha, to scream; therefore a rocket is the thing that screams as it is
shot up in the air. And this word is still used successfully." The journalists
outpaced the linguists. Like Persian, French, Spanish and many other
languages, Arabic has an academy to guide and regulate it; in fact it has
several. "But," Boullata says, "what with scholarly discussions and debates,
these academies are too slow in developing new terms in relation to the
speed needed to use them in daily communication. A joke is told that they
invented a term for 'sandwich,' and it is the following: al-shatir wal-mashtur
wal-kamikh baynahuma (the divider and the divided and the mixed pickles
between them)."
Today, whether in Algiers or Cairo, Damascus or Baghdad, a wide
gap separates the simplified grammar and diction used in the congested
slums from the elevated style deployed by intellectuals. As a mother tongue,
Arabic is growing at a faster rate than any other major language, and its
speakers are on average younger. The implications are political as well as
cultural. "The calls for holy war that adorn the walls in slums throughout the
Middle East," Chris Hedges wrote in the New York Times, are written not in
classical Arabic but in "a far simpler argot . . . Expressed in the cruder
rhythms and pronunciations of street language, they become almost
incomprehensible to educated Arabs, only widening a dangerous gulf
between an elite that looks to the West and an enraged underclass." The
jagged divisions within Arab society are mirrored by divisions in the language
itself. Hedges proposed an analogy: "What if 80 or 90 percent of Americans
spoke every day in the brutal and angry cadences of gangsta rap, while the
members of a feudal upper class mused over their own demise in Elizabethan
English?"
Even so, the combined influences of Islam, economic
modernization and the mass media reduce the likelihood that the various
dialects of Arabic will splinter into separate languages. The lasting power of
the Qur'an should never be underestimated. It gives God a mother tongue,
from which any change can appear an unworthy deviation. English has no
such stabilizing text: it feeds on novelty. Changes are its meat and drink.
There remains, nonetheless, something a little uncanny about the process by
which newborn expressions spread through society. Steven Pinker, who
appears to know nearly everything about the inner workings of English,
confesses in his 2007 book The Stuff of Thought that "the fortunes of new
words are a mystery" and that "we still can't predict when a new word will
take root." Pinker suggests that the most arresting neologisms are often
ones that wither and die, for instead of merely naming something, they deliver
an implicit editorial. "Soccer mom" has settled into American English, but the
more recent "security mom"—a female voter worried about terrorism— may
not last for long. Comment is free, and it goes out of date fast.

* * *

To a writer, the prodigal scope and diversity of English are both a blessing
and a curse. A blessing, because the language offers juicy specimens of al-
most any verbal trend you can imagine. But also a curse, because anything
you say about English is liable to contradiction. In Melbourne, "garry" means
to flirt; in Liverpool, it means an ecstasy tablet. What applies to a verb in
Portland, Oregon, may not apply in Portland, Dorset, still less in Portland
Cottage, Jamaica. The dispersal, flowering and transformation of English
around the world raise a crucial question: will this remain a single language?
Perhaps it will soon be an act of nostalgia to speak about English in the
singular. For a time, the future may belong not to English but to Englishes.
Because of political, cultural and economic reasons, rather than
strictly linguistic ones, today's English has a charismatic power. Ambitious
people everywhere thirst to master the language. But as other idioms blur
into it, especially in Asia and Africa, and as the many kinds of English
spoken outside Britain and North America become louder and more
confident, the language may be approaching an irrevocable split. Indian
English, for example, is distinctive not just in its word-hoard, but also in
aspects of its grammar and phonetics. French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian
and several other languages all branched out of Latin. It's conceivable that
English will be the Latin of the new millennium.
Conceivable, but not inevitable. The combined influences of global
business, media, politics, Hollywood and the Internet have an awesome
linguistic power. They entail instant communication and instant
comprehension, a requirement that may prove strong enough to pull English
back from the brink of schism. The Roman Empire did not have CNN or
Microsoft at its disposal. For the moment, a rough balance appears to exist
between the forces working to pull English apart and those laboring to keep it
united. The language's long-term future depends on which tendency— the
centrifugal or the centripetal—proves stronger.
Its short-term future promises yet more growth. In 1997 the British
Council released a major report by the linguist David Graddol entitled The
Future of English? The question mark is significant, for Graddol's uncertainty
matched his erudition. The growth of English, he argued, is unlikely to
happen in a straightforward or predictable manner: "On the one hand, the use
of English as a global lingua franca requires intelligibility and the setting and
maintenance of standards. On the other hand, the increasing adoption of
English as a second language, where it takes on local forms, is leading to
fragmentation and diversity. No longer is it the case, if it ever was, that
English unifies all who speak it." Beyond question, fragmentation and
diversity have grown in the past few decades. Yet unless democratic
governments are replaced by totalitarian ones, it's unclear who could
possibly set and maintain the standards Graddol mentioned. I find it hard to
imagine any organization with the breadth and authority to accomplish such
a task. Still, for the first time in decades the heretical idea of regulating
English is at least being discussed.
Graddol returned to the topic in a 2006 study, English Next. There
he predicted that as early as 2010 or 2015, "nearly a third of the world
population will all be trying to learn English at the same time." The demand
for teachers and texts will be intense. "One Korean Internet provider," he
notes, "is offering English courses for fetuses still in the womb." Never in
human history has a single language been so widespread. "English is now,"
Graddol writes, "redefining national and individual identities worldwide; shifting
political fault lines; creating new global patterns of wealth and social
exclusion; and suggesting new notions of human rights and responsibilities of
citizenship." That's an awful lot of power for any language to bear. But what
exactly has this language become, and how might it change?

* * *

In the remaining chapters I'll approach the linguistic future in a few sly,
perhaps surprising ways. Texts that tell you precisely what to expect in the
decades ahead are not just misleading, they're fraudulent—nobody knows
what the future holds, in language or anything else. This book is not a crystal
ball.
The future has always been cloudy; it always will be. It's best
approached, I believe, by looking keenly and closely at what's happening now
in the world, without prejudices or preconceptions. Such scrutiny will reveal a
few common themes. Whether it be the growth of chatroom speech among
teenagers or the rise of mixed idioms like Spanglish, we'll discover that
people with little political or economic power can exert enormous influence on
language. And whether it be the impact that English is having on Japanese or
the effect that Asian languages are having on English, we'll find a tension
between the informal and formal registers of language —between the top-
down and the bottom-up forces that lead to verbal change. Although the
language may not be going to hell in a handbasket— what is a handbasket,
anyway?—some of its speakers appear ready to burninate a noob.
Talk 2u l8r.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0618571221
• ISBN 13: 9780618571222
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 262
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Procter & Gamble Service GmbH, Braun; https://in.pg.com/contact-us/; ; Sulzbacher Str. 40-50; Schwalbach/Ts.; 65824; Deutschland