Late New English (1800 – present)

Industrial and Scientific Revolution. Thedates may be rather arbitrary, but the main distinction between Early New and Late New English (or just New English as it is sometimes referred to) lies in its vocabulary - pronunciation, grammar and spelling remained largely unchanged. Late New English accumulated many more words as a result of two main historical factors: the Industrial Revolution, which necessitated new words for things and ideas that had not previously existed; and the rise of the British Empire, during which time English adopted many foreign words and made them its own. No single one of the socio-cultural developments of the 19th Century could have established English as a world language, but together they did just that.

Most of the innovations of the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th century were of British origin, including the harnessing of steam to drive heavy machinery, the development of new materials, techniques and equipment in a range of manufacturing industries, and the emergence of new means of transportation (e.g. steamships, railways). At least half of the influential scientific and technological output between 1750 and 1900 was written in English. Another English speaking country, the USA, continued the English language dominance of new technology and innovation with inventions like electricity, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the sewing machine, the computer, etc.

The British Empire. British colonialism had begun as early as the 16th century, but gathered speed and momentum between the 18th and 20th century. At the end of the 16th century, mother-tongue English speakers numbered just 5-7 million, almost all of them in the British Isles; over the next 350 years, this increased almost 50-fold, 80% of them living outside of Britain. At the height of the British Empire (in the late 19th and early 20th century), Britain ruled almost one quarter of the earth’s surface, from Canada to Australia to India to the Caribbean to Egypt to South Africa to Singapore.

Although the English language had barely penetrated into Wales, Ireland and the Scottish Highlands by the time of Shakespeare, just two hundred years later, in 1780 John Adams was confident enough to be able to claim that English was “destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age”. In 1852 the German linguist, Jacob Grimm, called English “the language of the world”, and predicted it was “destined to reign in future with still more extensive sway over all parts of the globe”.

It was taken very much for granted by the British colonial mentality of the time that extending the English language and culture to the undeveloped and backward countries of Africa and Asia was a desirable thing. The profit motive may have been foremost, but there was a certain amount of altruistic motivation as well, and many saw it as a way of bringing order and political unity to these chaotic and internecine regions (as well as binding them ever more strongly to the Empire). To some extent, it is true that the colonies were happy to learn the language in order to profit from British industrial and technological advances.

The rise of so-called “New Englishes” (modern variants or dialects of the language, such as Australian English, South African English, Caribbean English, South Asian English, etc) raised, for some, the spectre of the possible fragmentation of the English language into mutually unintelligible languages, much as occurred when Latin gave rise to the various Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc) centuries ago. As early as 1789, for example, Noah Webster had predicted “a language in North America as different from the future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German or from one another”. However, in retrospect, this does not seem to have happened and, in the age of instantaneous global communication, it now seems ever less likely to occur in the future.

Present day. The language continues to change and develop and to grow apace, expanding to incorporate new jargons, slangs, technologies, toys, foods and gadgets. In the current digital age, English is going through a new linguistic peak in terms of word acquisition, as it peaked before during Shakespeare’s time, and then again during the Industrial Revolution, and at the height of the British Empire. According to one recent estimate, it is expanding by over 8,500 words a year (other estimates are significantly higher), compared to an estimated annual increase of around 1,000 words at the beginning of the 20th century, and has almost doubled in size in the last century.

In recent years, there has been an increasing trend towards using an existing words as a different part of speech, especially the “verbification” of nouns (e.g. to thumb, to parrot, to email, to text, to google, etc), although some modern-sounding verbs have surprisingly been in the language for centuries (e.g. to author, to impact, to parent, to channel, to monetize, to mentor, etc). “Nounification” also occurs, particularly in business contexts (e.g. an ask, a build, a solve, a fail, etc). The meanings of words also continue to change, part of a process that has been going on almost as long as the language itself.

In our faddy, disposable, Internet-informed, digital age, there are even word trends that appear to be custom-designed to be short-lived and ephemeral, words and phrases that are considered no longer trendy once they reach anything close to mainstream usage. Resources like the Urban Dictionary exist for those of us who keep track of such fleeting phenomena.

LECTURE 3