Language changing - Everybody of us is aware of the fact that the world is in constant change.

University Degree Education and Teaching

Language changing

Everybody of us is aware of the fact that the world is in constant change. Apart from some evolutions which are linked to environmental and geological causes and which can be, in the most of cases, predictable or scientifically studied; we often find ourselves facing changes strictly connected to social human life.

The essential instrument that allows us to live is language which mirrors all the shifts, both in the way we refer to the context we live in and in the way we communicate with other people.

Since language is human peculiarity it is not set in stone but it is an ever ending phenomenon. A large number of shifts are to be identified: The progress of technology and these days especially new ways of communication e.g. e-mails and text messages is changing the English language to a great extend as well. This change is happening very fast. Nowadays, for example, a new word can make it into a dictionary in a few month. However, it is not merely the fast expansion of vocabulary: spelling and even grammar are changing, too. The negative influence of the Weblish is the tendency of shrinking our communication by abbreviating every world and even more serious is the fact that many people, above all old people, who are not familiar with technology risk being left behind and not comprehending the meaning of the “new” words. But according to professor David Crystal we should not be anxious about all this linguistic evolution because rapid development of new technologies has always “brought its prophet of doom”. Specialist in all different fields of science and technologies need new words to explain new processes.

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Another shift of language that can be observed considering British society is the increase of up-talking, otherwise called HRT. Up-talk means that every sentence ends an interrogative tone. This phenomenon is not brand new, however, you cannot definitely say when and where it first turned up. What you can find is that there are mainly young people and predominantly women, who use up-talk. Most of them give it up when they are older, they only use to speak it because all the friends, all the “cool kids “ speak it , too. In the UK it is widely held to be an antipodean thing which is responsible for the change in the speech of the English; mainly through Australian soaps on TV. The phenomenon of HRT shows an increasing relativism in the way of speaking and using the language, that could bring to a certain confusion and misunderstanding. People could not be able to distinguish between statement and question. This proves the development of a certain fear of stating in words one’s ideas. Diane DiResta supposes that the HRT phenomenon could be the outgrowth of our political correctness. Nobody is able to say what he/she thinks, people are afraid to take a stand and HRT makes it possible to withdraw what we say.

If we have a closer look at a special group in British society, the students, we see that even the language of the students –the students slang- has been changing over the years. Students use slang to talk about “taboo” maters such as sex and drinking and other pleasure activities. Some of conservative English linguists consider it as a vulgarisation of the language. But if we look at the history of the language we can discover that there are some words that seem to be vulgar slang two centuries ago are commonplace now and are words using in everyday life situations. Students slang is not a recent phenomenon, it has been existed since the late 18th century. In the past Greek and Latin were academic languages. So new slang words were coined out of these two languages. Nowadays of course, students draw more on English, Afro-American Creole or black African speech in coining new words. As students slang is reflecting the multicultural make-up of the British student population, now increasingly it is British-Asian students who create many new slang terms which are rooted in the Indian language. Surprisingly it is also maintained that even the Queen’s English is exposed to language changing. In fact the Queen’s accent has shifted down the social scale of towards the speech of younger people. However she is just following general trends and, of course, she is still sounds upper class.

Finally we can say that all the language shifts we took into consideration seem to have a common ground: they have their origin in our everyday life, in the way we see things and get in touch with them!