Article Summary
In the article “Is English Changing?”, edited by Betty Birner, it is hypothesized that English, just like any other human language, is yearly changing unnoticeably along with the needs of language. According to the article, there are a plethora reasons ascribed to the changes that occur to the English language. The reasons are highlighted as; change in the speakers’ needs, disparity in language experiences, emergence of new words, change in sound for instance the ‘Great Vowel Shift’, and lastly changes in word order. In support of the changes, the writer states that ‘if English hadn’t changed since, say, 1950, we wouldn’t have words to refer to modems, fax machines, or cable TV
The article also compares the elegance of English during Shakespeare’s time and the present time. It is asserted that even though English is just changing and not getting worse, people think that the ancient English is much better the current English. To prove this, the writer illustrates that ‘a small winged creature with feathers was known as a brid. Over time, the pronunciation changed to bird’. The writer insinuates that the change from brid to bird must have taken place as a result of children in olden times having difficulty in pronouncing ‘brid’, a word that nobody can easily relate to the current ‘bird’. The writer further illustrates that with the advent of colloquial language, the battle with regards to the usage of some words, for instance ‘hopefully’, ‘anymore’ and ‘lately’, seems to have been lost.
In addition, the article also tries to explain why people tend not to use correct English which is conventionally called Standard English in the article. The principal reason highlighted in the article revolves around the existence of significantly many dialects of English that are only usable by one depending the use of English language as one was growing up. For instance, the writer affirms that the ‘Seventeenth-century grammarians believed Latin was the ideal language so they thought English should be as much like Latin as possible’.
Reference
Betty Birner (Ed.) (n.d.). Is English Changing? Linguistic Society of America. 1-2. Retrieved from http://www.lsadc.org/info/pdf_files/Is_English_Changing.pdf
