Millennials: Changing English Language

How Millennials are Changing the English Language

Samuel Tristan Baladad

I. Introduction

English language is one of the most widely spoken language in the world. It is a dominant language. As the time flows, new words are being added to the English dictionary. There are various reasons for an English language to evolve and one of the reasons that impacts the most is the effect of new technologies being developed over time. In the current generation; what demographers refer to as generation Y also known as millennials, the generation of people born between early 1980s to 2000s, are causing a gradual change to the English language. With millennials extensive use of internet, different combination of words and phrases are being formed and widely

The first is the old English period. Christianity and poetry had a great influence in this era. Many religious texts, and famous poems was written in old English. In fact, some of its vocabulary had survived and is currently being used in modern English; words such as, sleep, food, earth and house. The second is the middle English period, started when the Normans invaded England. French had become the spoken language of the upper class which influenced literature and political documents to be written in French. However, most of its population still speaks in English. This is where bilingualism started to become common. Because of the current situation in that period, changes in spelling had occurred and various words from French had become part of the English vocabulary such as, army, poet, parliament, castle, and servant. The third is the early modern English period where the great vowel shift and the English renaissance took place. Pronunciations of the English language had a major change. Large number of Latin and Greek words were borrowed and put into the language, many English diphthongs became monophthongs, and many long vowels became shorter. One of the influential writers that has contributed in this shift was Shakespeare. His combination of native and borrowed words like afeard, thou, art, arrant, and offert, was unique which led him to be recognized by people as an English language genius. The

At this past weekend’s conference of Very Important Linguists, they presented their grand unified theory of totesing.

People might use totes-words in silly contexts, but this is a serious topic because totesing represents a surprising new direction for the English language. If the words sound weird, that’s because they are weird. They contain unexpected sounds in unexpected places.

And that’s the first thing to understand about totesing, the linguists say. It’s not a game that people play with spellings or character-count limits. It’s about rearranging sounds. People disagree on whether “casual” becomes caj, cazh, or cajs, but they all agree on how to pronounce the shortened word.

“This is not just some random thing people do with written words,” Jones said. “Totesing is about sounds and it conforms to the sometimes complicated sound system of English.” In this way, studying how people make up these words is like studying a construction site — you get to see all the pylons undergirding the English