Your Speech is Changing

In writing, too, a change has taken place. The use of the colloquial in American writing is increasing rather than diminishing. The increasing use of the colloquial in our writing is an interesting change that is bound to have far-reaching consequences.
Nobody knows why all these changes are been made, perhaps we are in the process of reducing our verbs to a few basic words. If this is so, it may mark a change as significant as that which took place after the Norman conquest.
Many new words have been added to the English language in the past forty years; and since Shakespeare’s time the number of words in the language has increased more tsomewhere between 700,000 and 800,000. Most of these new words have not come from borrowing, but from the nature growth of the language.
The language has always changed, but the rate of the change has been uneven; minor changes have slowly accumulated in every generation, but there have been periods of rapid changes as well. The most important of these periods occurred during the two hundred and fifty years after 1066, the year the Normans conquered England. Before the conquest, the inhabitants in England spoke Anglo-Saxon, a complex Germanic language. The Normans were Norsemen who, after generation of raiding, had settled in northern France in the tenth century and by 1066 were speaking a form of French. After their conquest of England they instituted Norman French as the dominant language—the language of the upper class, of law, of government, and of such commerce as there was.
Whatever the reasons for the changes that are taking place, the vocabulary will probably continue to expand, because the expansion of our knowledge and experience requires the invention of new words or the adaptation of old ones. Meaning will depend more and more upon word order and context, spelling will become simpler, with fewer common variants. Pronunciation, because of the great mobility of our population and the spread of radio and television, will tend to become more uniform.
The enormous of enlargement of our vocabulary, the increasing use in our writing of the spoken idiom, and changes in our pronunciation are not the only changes that are taking place, however. There have also been significant grammatical alteration in our language. Such changes take place only by generations or decades at the fastest, so they pass unnoticed by all but grammarians; yet even the layman can perceive them when he is told that something that seems “quite all right” to him was regarded as erroneous only a few years ago.
Your Speech is Changing
If a contemporary Rip Van Winkle had slept for forty years and awakened today, he would have to go back to school before he could understand a daily newspaper or a magazine. He would never have heard of atomic bombs, baby sitters, flying saucers or contact lenses- nor of mambo, microfilms, nylons, or smog.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during which printing became established, saw the stabilization of spelling and, more important, the establishment of colonies in America. Immediately, the language of the New Word and that of the Old World began to draw apart.
Nevertheless, the masses went right on speaking Anglo-Saxon. By about three hundred years after the Norman conquest, Anglo-Saxon had re-established itself as the language of the upper class, as English, and had become a flexible, exact splendid, and moving instrument of expression. Norman French, meanwhile, had become something comic, spoken by the villain in the old mystery plays just for a laugh.