English as a language is becoming more democratic as even MPs fail to speak it properly, a study from Cambridge reveals.
The average English-speaking child is likely to utter the word ‘like’ five times as often as his or her grandparents. English-speakers also use the word ‘love’ more than six times as often as ‘hate’ and ‘save’ is used with ‘money’ twice as often as ‘spend’.
These are among the findings of the Cambridge English Corpus, one of the biggest and most eclectic collections of the English language in the world.
In twenty years the researchers have compiled more than two billion words, which would take eighty-eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty-six hours to read out loud. They include more than seventy-five million words of spoken English, gathered from sources as diverse as Radio 1 news bulletins, American chat shows and sound recordings of everyday conversations submitted by the public.
The database offers a clear insight into modern usage of words and phrases and is also full of surprises.
The British, for example, are not solely obsessed by the weather as one might expect. The word is as common in American English as it is British, and is usually used next to words such as ‘bad’, ‘cold’, ‘wet’ and ‘extreme’.
One thing that might not come as a surprise is the decline in the correct use of grammar.
Michael McCarthy, emeritus professor of applied linguistics at the University of Nottingham and author of Cambridge Grammar of English, said that the corpus showed a ‘growth towards informality’ over the past two decades. ‘We can listen to debates in Parliament and hear MPs saying things like “gonna” instead of “going to”‘ he said.
This shift towards casual English was epitomised by an appearance by the Prince of Wales on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in 2005 that contrasted sharply with his usual immaculate speech, according to Professor McCarthy. ‘If you didn’t know that it was Prince Charles speaking, you would think it was a lazy, sloppy speaker of the language. It was because he gave a very nice informal interview. I’m sure the royals even thirty years ago would not have gone on air and chatted so informally.’
He said that the art critic Brian Sewell and historian David Starkey were among those who upheld formal English in the public eye, while the broadcaster and journalist Janet Street-Porter and the footballer David Beckham were ‘on the more demotic end’.
What do I make of all this? It is absolutely clear that the formal use of the English language is in decline. We no longer have pride in articulating every syllable when we speak and use so many abbreviations, which sound so terribly mundane and rob the language of its beautiful rhythmic impact.
The days seem to have gone when debates in Parliament by such dominant figures as Winston Churchill and Aneurin Bevan used to be a master class in elocution and a revelation of the richness of the language.
Even the written word today is suffering a great deal. It often lacks clarity, phrases are botched up, and the flow is sometimes awkward and haphazard. Elegance is rarely visible to give the language the poetic quality it deserves. For words are another form of music. They have to be expressive and melodiously catching. Then their legacy as an art form will endure indefinitely.
The cheapjacks of politics will do well to take heed and clean up their acts by using the language clearly and to its most coherent optimum.
