Is the Queen's English Really Dead?

The Queen's English Is Dead
By Annalee Newitz, AlterNet. Posted April 3, 2008.

By the time English truly is a dominant language on the planet, it will no longer be English. Instead, say a group of linguists interviewed in a recent article by Michael Erard in New Scientist, the language will fragment into many mutually-unintelligible dialects. Still, some underlying documents will supply the grammatical glue for these diverse Englishes, the way Koranic Arabic does for the world's diverse Arabic spinoff tongues. English-speakers of the future will be united in their understanding of a standard English supplied by technical manuals and Internet media.
People like me, native English speakers, are heading to the ashcan of history. By 2010, estimates language researcher David Graddol, 2 billion people on the planet will be communicating in English -- but only 350 million will be native speakers. By 2020, native speakers will have diminished to 300 million. My American English, which I grew up speaking in an accent that matched what I heard on National Public Radio and 60 Minutes, is already difficult for many English-speakers to understand.
Hence the rise of Internet English. This is the simple English of technical manuals and message boards -- full of slang and technical terminology, but surprisingly free of strange idioms. It's usually also free of the more cumbersome and weird aspects of English grammar.
For example, a future speaker of English would be unlikely to understand the peculiar way in which I express the past tense: "I walked to the store." Adding a couple of letters (-ed) to the end of a verb to say that I did something in the past? Weird. Hard to hear; hard to say. It's much more comprehensible to say: "I walk to the store yesterday." And indeed, that's how many non-native speakers already say it. It's also the way most popular languages like the many dialects of Chinese express tense. The whole practice of changing the meaning of a word by adding barely audible extra letters -- well, that's just not going to last.
When I read about the way English is changing and fragmenting, it has the opposite effect on me than what you might expect. Although I am the daughter and granddaughter of English teachers and spent many years in an English department earning a PhD, I relish the prospect of my language changing and becoming incomprehensible to me. Maybe that's because I spent a year learning to read Old English, the dominant form of English spoken 1,000 years ago, and I realize how much my language has already changed.
But my glee in the destruction of my own spoken language isn't entirely inspired by knowing language history. It's because I want English to reflect the lives of the people who speak it. I want English to be a communications tool -- like the Internet, a thing that isn't an end in itself but a means to one. Once we all acknowledge that there are many correct Englishes, and not just the Queen's English or Terry Gross' English, things will be a lot better for everybody.
I'll admit sometimes I feel a little sad when my pal from Japan doesn't get my double entendres or idiomatic jokes. I like to play with language, and it's hard to be quite so ludic when language is a tool and nothing more. But that loss of English play is more than made up for by the cross-cultural play that becomes possible in its stead, jokes about kaiju and non-native snipes at native customs. (My favorite: said Japanese pal is bemused by American Christianity, and one day exclaimed in frustration, "God, Godder, Goddest!")