Those who think the English language is in decline due to technologically advanced ways of communicating, such as text messaging and instant messaging, can relax.
According to Dr. Seth Katz, assistant professor of English at Bradley University, people have complained about the decline of language since the Renaissance.
“Language is going to hell only if you have no tolerance for change,” Katz said.
Language is fluid
Katz said language is fluid and constantly changes. He describes language as “organic” and something which cannot be stopped from changing.
Washington Community High School language arts teacher, Nancy Quinn, agrees.
“Like every language, English is constantly in flux. People say we need to go back to the way it was, but are we going to go back to Old English? No one would understand it because it sounds like German. Modern English started around Shakespeare’s time, but even that is difficult for us to understand,” Quinn said.
To illustrate how language changes over time, Katz said younger people tend to say the expression “on accident” while older people say “by accident,” the latter being correct.
“Young people always rebel against language, which adults hate, just like teen music,” he said.
Just as fashion seems to repeat every 20 years, words retire and resurface in the English language. Katz said the jazz crowd
originally used the word “groovy” and the word resurfaced later with the hippie generation.
And new words seem to surface suddenly to mark a moment in time. During the Clinton administration, the word “wonk,” which means a person who knows a topic forward and backward, surfaced.
Today, there are many new words that have resulted with technology, such as tweet, webisode, unfriend, blog and vlog.
“There are probably a lot of slang words now that will become a part of standard English, although it may not be in our lifetime. That’s just a natural part of language,” Quinn said.
There is also a new abbreviated way to communicate when texting or instant messaging. Many have seen expressions, such as “Ur l8t” (you’re late), ttyl (talk to ya later) or LOL (laughing out loud) in these types of messages.
Again, Katz said this does not mean that people will forget how to spell words or become bumbling idiots.
Hasty messages
“In a world where, increasingly, messages are delivered in smaller and hastier bits (think of Twitter and texting), more and more messages are delivered in more and more haste, and with less and less patience and craft. So, it may seem that we are being buried in bad writing. However, most of these messages are simply the ones we would have left hastily scrawled on the kitchen table once upon a time, or messages we would have delivered by a brief phone call, or messages we would have saved to deliver later at leisure,” Katz said. “If you use Facebook, then you have encountered the person who has to tell you all the minute details of their day as they are happening. Once, rather than appearing in writing for the world to read, those messages would have waited for dinner table conversation.”
Katz agreed there are still rules to follow in certain situations, and if a student writes “gr8t” to mean “great” on an English paper, that is a problem. But Katz has not witnessed this much.
“I find very little — if any — of the habits of texting or e-mail creeping into my students’ writing. They understand the differences, and they can shift deftly from one register to the other. They more often tend, as students always have, to have trouble distinguishing between the particular turns of phrase appropriate to speaking, and those appropriate to writing. That comes from not reading enough — and there have always been people who don’t read enough to develop an ear for the differences between writing and speaking. I don’t think everyone can learn to write formal English well.
“I encourage my students to know their weaknesses (for example, if they are poor editors) and to find friends who can help them — as people do in the real working world: one has the ideas, but another needs to craft them into a report, and a third needs to edit and polish. The schools do a disservice to students if they always treat writing as a solo act,” Katz said.
Quinn agreed with Katz that students have an understanding of the difference between formal and informal English.
“I usually preface when I give them an assignment that it needs to be in formal English,” she said. “Sometimes the students will use abbreviations or slang and I just say, ‘Hey, you gotta write it out’ or tell them it is slang where slang isn’t appropriate.”
Quinn also teaches as an adjunct faculty member at Illinois Central College.
“I have a wider variety of students with different backgrounds [at ICC], and it takes a little bit more explaining what is acceptable and not acceptable in formal writing,” she said.
Different roles
Just as college students and teachers have a role to perform regarding the English language, Katz said everyone speaks differently, depending on the setting.
“You talk to your friends differently than you talk to your parents and the clerk at Target,” he said. “We play different roles.”
The question of whether society maintains formal standard English is a complex one, Katz said.
“I don’t know how much active maintenance it actually needs: its users and proponents tend to ‘maintain’ it by including and providing economic and social opportunities as incentives to those who use formal Standard English, and by excluding and discriminating against those who don’t. So, the personnel officer who reads a poorly written application letter, and discards that letter (and the applicant) without regard for whether the applicant has actual qualifications for the job (which may not require strong written English skills), is (often unconsciously) reinforcing and maintaining the formal Standard dialect by not giving greater economic opportunities to a person who can’t deploy that dialect well,” Katz said.
Katz said in general, people stereotype groups by the way they speak.
“We mark what groups we are members of by the way we talk,” he said.
The battle of what is considered “correct” language and grammar continue.
“(Language) exists in a dynamic state of change and tension among a variety of social groups and economic and communication interests. The multiplication of outlets for public discourse and expression brought about by the Internet, and the convergence of all media to digital formats, lead to more opportunities to compete over what versions of the language will be regarded as Standard or prestigious. And that makes some people really uneasy,” Katz said.
Specifically, Katz said there are two things people get “all het up about” regarding language: “their personal bugaboos (don’t begin a sentence with because; avoid passive voice, etc.); and genuine problems with figuring out just what the writer meant.”
“It takes work and craft and patience and feedback from good readers and repeated revision to write a document that most readers will find clear in meaning and well-organized.
“There is still plenty of good writing taking place every day. There is just so much more writing taking place that the bad writing seems to become overwhelming,” he said.
