February 26th, 2007

As far as living languages go, English is pretty old. It started back in maybe 500 or 600 AD, and was a mix of Germanic and Celt and probably something else. But you wouldn't recognise it if you saw it: What the scholars call Old English had letters we don't even use any more, didn't have a few that we now do use, and it sounded like ... well, like nothing you've ever heard before, unless you are familiar with the sound of Old German.

People often listen to a Shakespeare play and mistakenly call that, "Old English" which is kind of amusing to me, since I studied the English language at university, and, relatively speaking, Shakespeare is damn near the same as what we speak today. But forget Old English, even looking at and trying to read Middle English (Chaucer is the common example) is a heck of a challenge.

So Old English, Middle English, Early Modern, and "Modern" English ... it is clearly a dynamic language that is always changing. It seems to almost become static for longish periods of a time (centuries), then it sees a relatively dramatic shift that lasts a few decades, emerging from that period of change as a slightly different language. Examples: The Great Vowel Shift, The Invasion of the Normans.

Some would argue that we are living through another of those significant changes right now: The Information Age. That is, English is changing because of mass media like TV and radio, and also because of the change in our presentation of English through Internet and email.

But do you know what it really means to say that English is changing? It doesn't mean that we are now text-messaging "C U @ 8 4 DNR". That is the current new common vernacular; that's always changing and seldom has any permanent effect on a language. What it really means is that the Formal English is changing. Formal English, by the way, is the English we use to write official and government documents, as well as educational materials, and it does not change with the fluid rapidity that the commonly spoken "street" English does.

Scholarly works written in, say, the 1930s in the UK or America or Canada might be barely distinguishable from similar works written last year, or those that will be written a decade or two from now. That English—Formal English—is not changing and adapting itself constantly and dramatically.

But it might be evolving slowly over time because of what is happening in the common spoken English world. (There is also a simplified form of English used for communication between and within industries which may be slightly influencing Formal English as well, just because of the constant additions of new jargon—as a technical writer, I know all about that particular flavour of English.)

That evolution is, I think, the key to all of this: English is a living, dynamic language. And we sometimes fall into a trap of thinking that the changes in our everyday language must mean that we are participating in a changed English landscape. But we aren't. The Internet English that we use is not the next step in the evolution of the language ... changes occur constantly and sometimes dramatically "at the street level", but those changes aren't necessarily part of the evolution of the language; in fact, they are nearly always just temporary changes.

Formal English is the version to watch for evolutionary changes, for it is the English preserved and attended to. Formal English is the standard that all else depends on, and it is the heritage that, even though it is always slightly changing (with glacial speed), ensures we can still communicate with each other now and into the future.

So while we might be writing emails in a form of English that is constantly eroding and devolving in terms of spelling, grammar, and punctuation, we are not seeing the Fall of the Western Empire because of it. Scholars maintain continuity in our Formal English, and by keeping that standard they are preserving our future.

Read more rants - Top Blogs - Comment on this rant - Email me