On Laura Spinney, dying languages, and why I’m not actually worried
Laura Spinney’s piece in the Guardian asks whether English could die, the way Latin died, the way ancient Egyptian died. It’s a fair question dressed as an absurd one. English currently behaves like it’s immortal; it isn’t. Nothing is. As the linguist Martin Haspelmath puts it, English could die exactly as Egyptian did; the only real questions are when, and how.
What Spinney’s article does well is refuse the easy prediction. Language doesn’t decline on a schedule. It’s pushed and pulled by migration, technology, and the occasional black swan: the spread of Arabic through Egypt wasn’t a linguistic inevitability, it was a historical accident with linguistic consequences. Recorded history is five thousand years old; humans have been talking for a great deal longer than that, and most of that talking left no trace at all. Confidence about the future of any language is mostly confidence about the recent past, dressed up.
The more interesting claim, though, is the distinction between English shrinking and English dying. Latin didn’t die so much as fragment, into French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, the lot. English is already doing something similar, just without the fragmentation, because writing and the internet act as a kind of glue that didn’t exist for an illiterate Roman Empire. Nigerian and Indian English already have more speakers between them than Britain and America combined; the traffic of vocabulary and structure is not one-way, whatever people in London might assume. Give it a century and ‘standard’ English may contain a great deal that would confuse a contemporary Londoner.
None of which changes what any of this means for a lesson on Tuesday. If English is a moving target rather than a fixed one, the useful skill isn’t memorising the rules as they currently stand; it’s understanding the structure well enough to keep up as it shifts. That’s rather more interesting than ‘unlock global opportunities’, and considerably closer to true.