Friends, most of April and all of May passed with nary a word from my keyboard - I am finishing and editing a novel. You know how utterly possessing that can be. What calls me back today is an article from the Telegraph. Linguist Nicolas Ostler, an expert on world languages, says that English will decline like the classical languages did before it, "English is already in decline and may become more of a 'text language' before dying out completely as a dominant language."
Usually what bothers me about these predictions is their totality. Like the belief held by some (not me) that electronic books will replace our beloved hardbacks. If that was the case, I'd say, people would have also decades ago, reliquinshed the typewrier and the pen for the laptop or the iPad. The reality is, typewriters are cool (I want one), people still write novels by hand, and paper-books are still in existence.
Ostler is a learned author and knows 26 languages. I expect he knows what he's talking about. And he's probably right. But part of me wonders, why must we know whether or not English is going to survive another millennia? I feel like the tools we survive by - our language, our art, our music - are precious things. These predictions seem like a cruel tease - to enjoy what we have now because they won't be around in the future. Or oddly enough, it sounds a little bit like mockery - "haha, the English language thinks it's so cool... haha". But do we really know? Something could happen. Technology might not continue on the present trend (which seems to be a matter of slowly, steadily swallowing our independence). Or technology might preserve what we have. Either way, English will change, not disappear.
English has accomplished too much from the writings of the Venerable Bede to Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens to... I dunno, Harry Potter. It's not going to be lost any time soon. In fact, with these examples in our midst (and MANY MORE), English might very well last forever!
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