Funeral For the English Language

Is English dead - or is it just evolving?

Somewhere in England there is a sign that reads St Marys Road. This is not a misprint. This horrific sight can be seen on a street sign somewhere in Yorkshire, as a result of a decision made by North Yorkshire Council’s decision to remove apostrophes from its street signs.

Apparently, it’s because their computers can’t handle apostrophes. Who knew apostrophes could be such explosive little marks?

Photo Description: This is a Canva graphic in black and white of a street sign that deliberately mispsells St Marys Road.

Meanwhile, Generation Z (people under the age of 27) are unhappy with the use of the full stop in WhatsApp messages. Most of us see it simply as a mark that denotes the end of a sentence. But Gen Z see the full stop as aggressive.

And this is the generation who wants us to save the planet for them!

When I go into classrooms to give my creative writing workshops, the children tell me about the cookies they’ll eat at breaktime, the diapers their parents use to change their little brothers and sisters. And when they spell out the word sneeze, they spell it with a Zee.

You can’t really blame these children. It’s coming from the videos they’re watching, the streaming services, the telly. And adults are swallowing down these Americanisms too. I was once asked to keep something on the downlow, instead of simply keeping it quiet. As though we were extras on LA Confidential.

I’m thinking of sending in a death notice to RIP.ie. In loving memory of The English Language. Died by A Thousand Cuts. Fondly remembered by those of us who spoke it with love and care. Donations, if desired, to the Apostrophe Protection Society.

But I am consoled by the wisdom of top linguists. They don’t believe the English language is dead. It is simply evolving, the way it has always done. It’s evolving faster at the moment, because we’re leaving the age of print and have moved into the digital communication age.

It has ever been thus – grammar rules coming and going, people lamenting the changes in grammar and vocabulary and then adapting to them. It wasn’t long ago that you were expected to spell ‘phone with an apostrophe.

The language needs to evolve so it can reflect how people speak it now, and how they use it in everyday life. Some grammar rules are too unwieldy for our age. The apostrophe was dropped from the spelling of phone once the word became more popular than the original word telephone.

There’s a delightful programme on BBC Radio 4 called Word of Mouth, where author Michael Rosen talks with guests about the different ways language is used. One of his guests was an anthropologist, who said that if you want to keep certain ways of speaking alive, the best thing to do is to keep speaking that way yourself.

So, I will keep eating biscuits and avoid changing nappies. And I will also preserve our lovely Hiberno-English ways of talking, lots of ‘tis and ‘twas, and even the odd whisht. I’ll be fierce excited. I’ll have mighty crack. And I’ll spell sneeze with a Zed – or even an Ezed.