This year, the Oxford English Dictionary has added a slew of new words to the dictionary, from “amazeballs” to “YOLO.”
Cue the defenders of the English language, who take these “cray” new words to signal the dumbing-down and ultimate demise of the English language.
But self-proclaimed defenders of language have been bemoaning its decline for hundreds, even thousands of years: “Our Language is extremely imperfect,” complained Jonathan Swift in his 1712 essay, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. “Its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions.”
George Orwell agreed in 1946: “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way.”
But linguists agree there’s never been a “golden age” of language.
In fact, if anything, humanity’s ability to communicate with each other has improved over time. Linguists theorize that the first spoken language, the mother tongue of all languages today, had a simple vocabulary and grammar system, and was spoken at a slower speed, compared to languages today.
Yet from that one Stone Age dialect, humanity has evolved to speak thousands of distinct languages across the globe. Today we’re still discovering new languages all the time, showing humanity’s determination to communicate with each other.
Every language in the world is a living thing, ever changing and evolving.
That includes written language as well, first developed from images drawn on cave walls. Back when those detailed pictures started to develop into more of a symbolic shorthand, there were probably language purist cavemen who protested against the decline of pictorial communication.
As much as language has evolved and changed throughout the centuries, it’s not going anywhere: Humanity has been using some form of language or other to communicate with each other for thousands and thousands of years. Though the specific medium of communication might change, we’ll never stop chatting.
Cue the defenders of the English language, who take these “cray” new words to signal the dumbing-down and ultimate demise of the English language.
But self-proclaimed defenders of language have been bemoaning its decline for hundreds, even thousands of years: “Our Language is extremely imperfect,” complained Jonathan Swift in his 1712 essay, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. “Its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions.”
George Orwell agreed in 1946: “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way.”
But linguists agree there’s never been a “golden age” of language.
In fact, if anything, humanity’s ability to communicate with each other has improved over time. Linguists theorize that the first spoken language, the mother tongue of all languages today, had a simple vocabulary and grammar system, and was spoken at a slower speed, compared to languages today.
Yet from that one Stone Age dialect, humanity has evolved to speak thousands of distinct languages across the globe. Today we’re still discovering new languages all the time, showing humanity’s determination to communicate with each other.
Every language in the world is a living thing, ever changing and evolving.
That includes written language as well, first developed from images drawn on cave walls. Back when those detailed pictures started to develop into more of a symbolic shorthand, there were probably language purist cavemen who protested against the decline of pictorial communication.
As much as language has evolved and changed throughout the centuries, it’s not going anywhere: Humanity has been using some form of language or other to communicate with each other for thousands and thousands of years. Though the specific medium of communication might change, we’ll never stop chatting.
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