The Demise of Good English

Will being the international language also lead to the downfall of English?

Microsoft, the BBC, McDonald’s, Queen Elizabeth II, Shakespeare, Madonna, MTV, the Beatles, Hollywood, CNN – Anglophonic culture represented by the English language is all over the planet. English is today’s “lingua franca”, that is, the language used for international communication by speakers whose native tongue is not English. It is used for international business, serves academic circles, and is the most prevalent language on the Internet and in popular media. Will English as we know it continue to dominate the global public sphere?

“Not necessarily so,” answers Hilla Ovil-Brenner, CEO of WhiteSmoke, a leading English grammar and writing software. “With so many people around the world using English at different levels of proficiency for such diverse purposes, there is an actual danger of it fragmenting into local varieties, unintelligible to non-local speakers, which is what happened to Latin in the Middle Ages. A less extreme scenario is the language being ‘dumbed down’ to a level less than desirable. ’Good English’ is the language used by university professors, the BBC, or leading book publishers, not the language we typically pick up from TV commercials,” she explains.

Ovil-Brenner is motivated to maintain an acceptable standard of English, as the language used in text-messaging, social media networks, or blogs is sometimes far from satisfactory in the eyes of even the most liberally inclined. She gives examples such as “I will see you later at the movies,” which becomes “CUL8ER@movie”, suspiciously spelled TV credits lacking capital letters, and the frivolous use of language by the likes of Paris Hilton. Such instances create a sense of confusion and embarrassment when deciding on how English should be used, especially among teenagers –tomorrow’s English users.

When a writer’s native tongue, or any other cultural or political factors, influences the use of English, new cultural-dependent vocabulary and even non-standard grammar may become the norm. “The same processes that led to differences between British and American English, resulting in lorry vs. truck, colour vs. color, and got vs. gotten, may serve as a precursor to much greater English language divisions,” she illustrates.

As they say, nothing lasts forever and the above trends do not bode well for the future of the English language. Ovil-Brenner maintains that “tools like WhiteSmoke get people thinking about how they use the language and remind them to stick to some common ground.” Respecting the basic elements of the English language while enabling individual creativity in English writing is at the heart of WhiteSmoke’s mission to further strengthen the effective use of English as an international language, without bringing it to its demise.