The 21st Century Flux

By Dizraeli
English. The new disease? Everybody’s single idiom is intermingling stream-like

It pours out of television speakers and computer Like streams

screens
But no, no barriers
Disregarding Babel with its very cocky fluency
No matter what dams and channels are established
Sticking on its labellings at every opportunity
They are irrelevant
Nothing’s safe: it doesn’t stop when it begins to spread
What matters is the message that is put across
It dominates the airways and reigns on the internet
And the passion that’s invested in it
Leaving cultures altered and confused as to what’s
Nothing’s lost
what
It merely mutates
Turns the dialectic of the youth to a hotch-potch
Let’s the people speaking it tweak it in new ways
Rag-tag, scrabble bag, everyone’s affected
Meaning that, meaning is whatever you say
The little languages will not survive unprotected
Jilly Jack Hussain Iraq to the UK
So hold your own
To all corners, through all twists and bends
But get a firm hold of English
Six billion personal versions of events
And every last one of us shall be a multi-linguist
It’s thrilling when you think
Singing shampoo, juggernaut, moolah, hulla baloo
Of all the tongues on the jostle
Ad infinitum, pow-wow, kudos, déja vu
Who express their puzzle
Won ton, billabong, beef, potato, hobo, dream
In the best words possible
Wha gwan with the wigwam Mr Chimpanzee?
The more words we have the more ways we have
So welcome to the 21st century flux
To express the world we have
English is the language of choice
To co-exist in
And when it dies, as every tongue eventually must
And if the English language is the lingua franca of this
Let it be said you added your voice
planet
The professor said Pif! What language is this?
Never say that it should be a closed system
Degenerate slang isn’t standard English
I said welcome to the 21st century flux
We at the top must establish limits
For now English is the language of choice for the
I said Prof! Language is the people that live it! performers

Get loose But when it dies, as every tongue eventually must

Give us some vision and foresight and juice Let it be said

We can fling the dictionary door wide You added your voice to the chorus

I live in a city where it seems like So English isn’t English

1

iSLCollective.com
It’s an elastic patchwork Antipodean and Finnish

A fantastically insane confederation And the list could continue

A very strange tapestry of foreign vernaculars Till my tongue went blue

Borrowed from Norse What I’m saying

Kings and fettered slave men Is the owner is you

So if language is linked It lives as it’s spoken

To the language it springs from And it mirrors the truth

English is linked to the globe in entirety And there isn’t any owner

Fragments of every language you can think of But you

Roots in every type of society I said welcome to the 21st century flux

Welsh, French, Jamaican, For now English is the language of choice

Indian, Italian, Dominican, Hispanic, Germanic But when it dies

Norse, African, Norman, Dutch As every tongue eventually must

Latin, Greek, Japanese Let it be said

Yiddish, Native American You added your voice

iSLCollective.com