To remain vital, language needs to reinvent itself, daily. And generally speaking, that’s a good thing else we would rapidly run out of words to describe all the new things that this world and the people on it, keep on inventing and producing. If a language begins to lose its capacity to express what people want to communicate it either reinvents itself or it becomes a dead language. It’s a Darwinian thing: Adapt or perish.
Language is also competitive – the language of a minority group is gradually subsumed into the language of the dominant group until it becomes extinct or fully absorbed in the dominant language. This has been true of most languages over the centuries and millennia. And it’s not a trivial thing: when a people loses its language the people lose a large part of their identity too. Quebecers, surrounded on all sides by English speaking people, fight to keep their French heritage alive, and this also means keeping the French language alive in Quebec.
Tagalog, the ‘national language’ of The Philippines, is a good example of a language losing its relevancy. It is originally the language of the local tribe in and around Manila Bay; it became the ‘official’ language primarily because the Spanish conquistadors made Manila the capital of the islands (much to the disgruntlement of Cebu). Most people living in the 25 other regions of the country’s 7000 islands speak different languages and dialects; for most people Tagalog is their second language, not their mother tongue. Tagalog (and for that matter, most of the other prominent languages of Pilipiñas) gradually absorbed many Spanish words over the 350 years of Spanish occupation the Philippines. After the Americans replaced the Spanish in 1898, English became increasingly used in The Philippines. Now, in 2025, English is taught in Pilipino schools as a second language, typical of third word counties hoping to make the next generation better able to adapt to the world’s lingua franca, English. Tagalog is becoming increasingly more anglicized (interesting word) every day; Filipinos will drop whole English expressions into a sentence rather than try to express the idea in Tagalog. Words for new ‘tech’ are almost always adopted directly from English. Tagalog is a living language but at risk of evolving into a hybrid language, or extinct.
English is a living language, and relatively modern, less than a thousand years old, a mongrel language with roots in many other languages. Modern English speakers can barely read Chaucerian English; For that matter, English speakers living in Chaucer’s time would find it near impossible to understand 21st century English. (One might also wonder what English spoken 175 years from now might be.)
People living in England 500 years before Chaucer didn’t speak English – they spoke Anglo-Saxon; or maybe the original ‘Anglos’ spoke Anglish, one supposes, and the Saxons spoke German. By AD 900 Anglish was being corrupted by marauding Vikings speaking Norse. When the Normans occupied England in 1066 they brought the Norse version of French at the time to England making England a bilingual country – French and Anglish. Latin was the predominant language in Britain during the Roman occupation but entirely disappeared after the Romans vacated the Island. Hardly anyone speaks Latin today, not even the Romans – they speak Italian. But what of the language spoken by the original British? Lost.
Hybrid English has become the dominant international language today, largely because of the reach of the British Empire, and the mercantile might of its main colony, America. It has also become the largest language in the world with some lexicologists estimating there are 500,000 to 1 million words. The Oxford English Dictionary lists 171,476 headwords currently in use, but many of those words have dozens of separate meanings. (The word ‘run’, apparently, has 645 separate usage cases.)
English may also have proliferated because of its propensity to be highly adaptive, readily absorbing words and expressions from other languages it encounters all over the world. Here are but two examples, common words most might not even recognize as borrowed from other languages: bungalow (Hindi), yo-yo (Ilocano (a native language of northern Luzon, Philippines)).
English is also a tolerant language. It doesn’t get all huffy and territorial when international users speak corrupted forms – hence pidgin English. Even native Englishmen have grown highly esoteric versions of English – who understands cockney besides East Londoners? International English is primarily a spoken language, which is to say it is used by everyday speakers often as their second language, people just trying to get their messages across to other people. It’s comparatively easy to learn how to speak, though harder to spell. For written English, international speakers rely heavily on google translate.
This fluidity amongst English speakers makes it a living language but also gives rise to the curse. Since it’s forever changing, people are always having to ‘keep up’. People happy with the changes quickly adapt; people who resist change, and that includes most pedants, complain. Speakers, foreign or domestic, being efficient, if not to say lazy, are likely to use the simplest language they can. Why use a five-syllable word when you can invent a shorter word? Spoken language is highly adaptive and changeable; written language is much slower to change, which is why spelling – often the original Anglo-Saxon, or French – often bamboozles those new to English. As a consequence, people constantly seek simpler spellings: thru instead of through; tuff rather than tough. Noah Webster wrote an entire dictionary of American English trying to simplify English spellings: color, not colour.
Modern English speakers continue to invent and use foreshortened words: ‘merch’ (for merchandise) or ’tech’ for technology (mainly electronic) products; early adopters see them as fast and efficient, to a conservative linguist they seem lazy and childish – but does that make them wrong? Once a shorthand word has become common usage we no longer squirm, unless it’s not familiar to the user. Hardly anyone says refrigerator in everyday spoken language, they say fridge. (Curiously they think fridge is derived from refrigerator but it actually comes from Frigidaire.) In The Philippines the word for refrigerator is reef! (I’m not sure how they spell it).
In a living language words come and go with the changes in society, especially the technology of the times: does anyone today know what a farrier is? or fletcher? In days gone by of horses and hunting these were commonly understood words. Trying to keep up with the times, Oxford Dictionary, and others, publish [new or retooled] words of the year each year – words or expressions that have come into regular usage and are judged to have staying power. Here are a few. No doubt, you can probably think of others.
Despite English being a highly adaptive living language there are still situations for which we lack a word that would otherwise make clear what we want to say: What is the word for an adult child/children? We seek gender neutral words so as not to offend those of different persuasions, and in the process confuse the communication: they for she/he/other.
Efficiency isn’t the only factor differentiating language. People are also status conscious and subject to ‘peer pressure’ and so quicky adopt words or expressions that somehow have become fashionable, or signal a person’s education and social status: vocabulary and diction easily distinguishes an aristocrat from a dockyard worker, a New Yorker from a California girl.
Language usage is also subject to fashion and popular vernacular. And often, thankfully, these mutations are only temporary. California girls-speak appears to be declining, like, I was like, shocking, and then I went, and he went, ,,
I’m a self-described literate person; I love language and respect the cultural heritage it represents. Okay, maybe I’m a conservative pedant but that’s not all bad. Standards are standards and shouldn’t be dismissed just because they’ve become unfashionable. Nor on the other hand should we persist with a clumsy application of a staid old rule, up with which we should not put. Language pedant I may be but an adaptive pragmatist one at times too, oxymoronic as that may be. I’ll tweak the King’s nose with my own stylizations, split infinitives when smoother to do so, freely use Oxford commas, vary spellings from British to American when it suits me (prefer -our (colour, neighbour) and -re endings (centre, meagre) to honour our Norman French heritage, but I’ll use -ize endings over British -ise endings (most of the time) when the word is pronounced as a hard zed, e.g., immortalize vs immortalise, plagiarize over plagiarise. There are dozens and hundreds of words that differ between Americanized and British spellings. As a student educated in English Canada in the 1960s, I learned British spellings, but lately I forget whether offence or offense, or licence or license, is correct, and need to consult my American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language which reminds me which is which and authorises either. (Did you see what I did there?)
Even though I respect the proclivity of English to adapt and evolve as a language, I must say it grates at times, at least until the change has become fully integrated into common and accepted usage, or discarded as vulgar to the ear, and the discerning mind.
For example, I cannot abide back-formations from nouns to un-conjugatable verbs: ‘impact’, (and not improved by defaulting to the passive voice): ‘I was greatly impacted by her’; arrggh. I’m often enough as exercised (but not exercized?) with the practice of adding -ize to a noun to make it a verb.
The practice of ‘verbalizing’ a noun by adding the suffix -ize to it is another reason words proliferate in English. The device is used to depict agency, an attempt to make transitive a noun (object or concept) or adjective (descriptive modifier). The -ize agency in the English language is an efficient way to depict in a single word what may take a whole phrase to otherwise convey. This can be a quite useful device – the very epitome of a living language – but it often offends the ear, or mind, until it becomes fully absorbed into common usage. (Fowler advises that the suffix -ize is actually correct as most of the time the verb is derived in fact from the Greek and not the French; unfortunately (because we don’t know which is which) we get it wrong most of the time; there is a small list of verbs that do correctly end in -ise because they are unrelated to the original Greek, e.g., advertise, circumcise.
I’m with Fowler, again: the -ize agency device may be useful, but let’s not overdo it; too often the new -ize word clangs in our ear, (Incentivize?!). But we gradually acclimate to it over time, (hospitalize, pressurize), unless the word goes out of fashion as fast as it came in.
English is a living language – it gives birth to new words continuously, even though often painful.
So what to do? Live with it, I guess.
Doug Jordan, reporting to you from Kanata
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