Language Anarchy

What happens when a language is cast adrift? When there is no one to keep the language in line?

As we all know, these aren’t idle questions for the English language today. True, there are countless software programs, books, websites, teachers, editors, and just plain busybodies straining to keep our language within bounds. They endeavor to make sure the sign in a supermarket reads “15 items or fewer” instead of “15 items or less”; to make sure it is whom you are addressing, but who addresses; to make sure that it’s a fine day because of its weather, and between you and me, someone among the three of us knows the answer.

The task is Sisyphean, but their combined labors have kept the language from rolling out of bounds—until now.

With new modes of written communication proliferating, however, anarchy threatens. Young people now write more than they ever have done, but their text messages and tweets, not to mention posts to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, and the like, pay no mind to the propriety that is proper to edited prose.

It’s language going wild. And what if—well, what if all those who person the barricades against language anarchy just gave up? What would become of the English language then?

Well, as a matter of fact, we know the answer to that question, because it has happened before. In the year 1066, to be exact, William of Normandy, who spoke French, defeated King Harold of England, who spoke English, at the Battle of Hastings. For the next three centuries the rulers of England followed William’s example and spoke French.

Only the lower classes continued to speak English during that time. It was unchecked by editors or teachers, whose language would be Latin if not French. English was turned loose to drift where it would.

And drift it did. Complex Anglo-Saxon inflections for nouns, verbs, and adjectives were simplified to the few we have today (none at all, for adjectives); enormous quantities of French words infused the English vocabulary, displacing or duplicating the native English word hoard. When cultivated authors and editors started using English again, it was clearly a mongrel language, fit only for—well, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dorothy Parker and all the rest.

So if English were let loose today, left to the mercy of the texters and tweeters, it would shiver a little (as all living languages do, even under tightest scrutiny) but not catch cold. And it would continue to be the mongrel language that dominates the world today lol.