Answers to Questions From Morning Readers
Do you have any data about the evolution of the English language? I know right now that language is evolving rapidly because of TikTok and the younger generations’ apprehension toward using millennial lingo. The change seems more exponential from 1900 to 2024 than from 1300 to 1500.
It can certainly seem as if English is changing faster than in the past, but mainly because of the blizzard of new terms and new slang. In terms of the actual heart of language — sounds, structures and basic words — English changed much faster from 1300 to 1500.
From 1300 to 1600, for example, Middle English became Modern English, which was different enough that Shakespeare and Chaucer would have found it dicey to converse beyond an elementary level. Vowels transformed so vastly that a word once pronounced ‘MAH-day’ became our ‘made.’
For all our neologisms like ‘diss,’ ‘because X,’ ‘X-adjacent’ and ‘I’m good,’ no transformation like that has happened in English for a very long time. Time traveling back to 1900, we would find that people used some words in different ways, and people would often sound a little funny in terms of accent. But they were speaking the language we speak.
Why is it that so many children and adults end a normal sentence with an inflection that makes it sound like a question? Where are the teachers and parents who should be correcting them?