Language Change

Norman Tebbit, 2011 (On london riots)

If you allow standards to slip to the stage where good English is no better than bad English … then there's no imperative to stay out of crime

Wilson, 1553

Complains of ‘Strange Ynkehorne termes’

Cheke, 1633

Our own tung should be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangled

Donald Mackinnon

Language dichotomies, people view language as right vs wrong, pleasant vs ugly

Aitchison

Crumbling castle, damp spoon, contagious virus

Johnson’s Dictionary, 1755

The first conclusive dictionary of the english language

Murray and Priestly, 18th Century

Grammarians that placed latin rules on english grammar

Humphreys

Language needs to be unambiguous. Uses example of the BBC avoiding using the word terrorist about a terror attack to change the way we think.

Humphreys, book

Lost for words, the mangling of the english language

Simon Heffer book

An A-Z of assaults on the English language

Oliver kamm on rules grammarians

A set of arbitrary edicts an principles

Oliver Kamm on what prescriptivists want

They want an arcadia; a golden society that never existed

Oliver Kamm idea on on middle aged

Middle aged people insist on arbitrary rules as they attempt to uphold the norms of their youth

Queens English Society

They say that the current direction of language change is leading to a loss of meaning

Caxton, 1476

Introduced the printing press which led to a specific dialect being chosen as standard of spelling and led to more foreign words being introduced

Keller

Noone can name a ‘decayed language’

Humphreys, on texters

Vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago

Wood

There is no correlation between texting frequency and spelling incompetency, instead use of textisms when young actually leads to better knowledge of phonology

3 examples of Wood’s textisms

Initialism, OMG, number homophones, h8, contractions, hmwk

Crystal on SMS

SMS is a genre in which the ideational, identifying and ludic functions of language combine in a climate of rapid technological change

Lee, University of Calgary

Increased texting reduces people’s ability to accept new words

Sutherland

Texting is penmanship for illiterates

Lindsay Johns

Texting uses ‘ghetto grammar’

Ilbury Study

Large corpus of texts on whatsapp, conventional spelling is actually upheld, and the group had a tendency to police standard english and would make fun of misspellings

What other device used abbreviations?

telegram

Crystal, on texting

Creativity is aided by texting

Marie Clair of the Plain English Campaign

There is a worrying trend of adults mimicking teen-speak. They are using slang words and ignoring grammar

Rushkoff

Without grammar, we lose the precision required to be effective and purposeful in writing

Shariatmadari on linguistic decline

Linguistic decline is the cultural equivalent of the boy who cried wolf, except the wolf never turns up

Shariatmadari, on expression

There is no such thing as linguistic decline, so far as the expressive capacity of the spoken or written word is concerned

Shariatmadari, justify

We tend to find intellectual justifications for our personal preferences