All languages change over time, and there can be many different reasons for this.

The English
language is no different – but why has it changed over the decades?

Some of the main influences on the evolution of languages include:

 The movement of people across countries and continents, for example migration and, in
previous centuries, colonisation. For example, English speakers today would probably be
comfortable using the Spanish word “loco” to describe someone who is “crazy”.
 Speakers of one language coming into contact with those who speak a different one. No
two individuals speak identically: people from different geographical places clearly speak
differently and even within the same community there are variations according to a
speaker’s age, gender, ethnicity and social and educational background. For example, the
word “courting” has become “dating”.
 New vocabulary required for inventions such as transport, domestic appliances and
industrial equipment, or for sporting, entertainment, cultural and leisure reasons. For
example, the original late 19th-century term “wireless” has become today’s “radio”.

Due to these influences, a language always embraces new words, expressions and pronunciations
as people come across new words and phrases in their day-to-day lives and integrate them into
their own speech.

Twentieth-century globalization, has been a vehicle for the diversification of English. But it has
also had the opposite effect, promoting convergence between varieties of English. Cultural
diffusion, particularly via mass marketing and mass media, has facilitated the spread of linguistic
features outwards from a high-prestige variety, with which others wish to align themselves. In
practice, this has generally meant the English of the USA, and the spread of American usages
into British and other Englishes – train station for railway station, for example, can for tin, the
pronunciation of the sch– of schedule as /sk/ rather than /sh/, the use of be like to introduce direct
speech (I was like, ‘Oh my God!’) and of cool as an all-purpose term of approval – has been a
phenomenon widely recognized (and often adversely commented on – though the fuss eventually
dies down, as what were originally Americanisms, such as deputize, hindsight and tornado, go
quietly native).

Restrictions on language

To that extent, English at the end of the twentieth century certainly seemed to operate in a more
relaxed and tolerant environment than at its beginning. But this liberality has to some degree
been counterbalanced by new restrictions, especially those proposed by advocates of what has
been termed (mainly by its detractors) ‘political correctness’. This trend, which began in the
1960s and gathered pace in the 1970s, embodies a desire to expunge words which reflect a
discriminatory attitude towards a particular (typically minority) section of society, and replace
them with more neutral or non-judgmental terms. The areas in which it has had the most far-
reaching effect on English vocabulary are race, gender and sexual orientation: nigger and faggot
‘male homosexual’, for example, now lie under ferocious taboos, and they has gone far towards
replacing he as a non-sex-specific pronoun for singular referents.

The Oxford English Dictionary records about 185,000 new words, and new meanings of old
words, that came into the English language between 1900 and 1999. That leaves out of account
the so-called lexical ‘dark matter’, words not common enough to catch the lexicographers’
attention or, if they did, to compel inclusion, words perhaps that were never even committed to
paper (or any other recording medium). Even so, those 185,000 on their own represent a 25 per
cent growth in English vocabulary over the century—making it the period of most vigorous
expansion since that of the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Given the diversification of the English language in the twentieth century, and the sheer increase
in the number of people using it, it would be surprising if it had not grown lexically. On top of
that, the century’s scientific discoveries and technological developments kept up a constant
demand for new vocabulary. In its first decade, for instance, English had to provide the basis of a
wholly new terminology for both aviation and the motor car. It responded with the likes of
aerodrome, airliner, fuselage, hangar, pilot, plane and accelerator, dashboard, garage,
limousine, motorway, speedometer, which are very much still with us today. A significant
proportion of this vocabulary was adopted from French, France being a leading innovator in the
relevant technologies, but in general English did not rely so much on foreign borrowing to
increase its resources as it had in previous centuries.

Modern Usage

The most recent scare has arisen from the usage of English in electronic communications, such as emails
and especially text messages, blogs and postings on social networks. This is certainly an area of the
written language unconstrained by the usual norms of orthography, punctuation and grammar, and
those particularly who do not communicate in these ways may fear that linguistic anarchy will ensue.
But there is little to it that is truly novel (abbreviated forms such as c u l8er for see you later, for
instance, have a venerable history, and have not inflicted any long-term damage on the language in the
past), and anyway, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century there are signs that the
popularity of textspeak is subsiding. English, in arguably its sixteenth century of existence, continues to
thrive and grow.