Accents and globalisation part 2

Further musings on the English language sparked off by listening to Bill Bryson's Journeys in English last week. This time I want to talk about written vs spoken English in terms of standard use.

Towards the end of the programme they were discussing possible future directions for English. The rise of literacy was mentioned as having changed things somewhat - rather than passing things on verbally, people can read information. Written English has a standard form, a 'correct' form that we're taught and tested on at school, and it's relatively slow to change. It helps to homogenise the language and stamp out regional forms. The more people read standard English the more it influences the way they formulate their own sentences. The rise of the internet, at first glance, seemed to make that even more likely as international English-speakers read American newspaper websites or the BBC.

However, the more I thought about internet trends (because I know about them, and what the youth are up to. Oh yes) the more I thought about non-standard communication. I might generally write this blog in standard English as I do my usual translation from Yorkshire to proper English in my head, but I'm a lot less formal on sentence structure than I could be and plenty of people write blogs in their own dialects. Then there's the recorded voice. In the same way that TV, films and radio have an influence on people's accents and vocabulary, popular podcasts and vlogs will no doubt influence others, but primarily they allow the presenter's accent to remain in place, maybe introducing their listeners to a new word or phrase here and there.

It remains to be seen how English changes and adapts over the next fifty or a hundred years but if nothing else we'll have plenty of recordings of how people sounded in the early twenty-first century. I might even add to that myself and record a few more stories to add to the ones you can already listen to.