Laurie Bauer

Emeritus professor of linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington

We are frequently told that the only languages which do not change are dead. Whether we want to believe it or not, English – as a living language – is changing.

We recognise some of the changes easily: the introduction of the word lockdown in the Covid context, for example, or the variation in pronunciation of the first syllable of dynasty so that sometimes it sounds like din and sometimes it sounds like dine.

Here are a few things which are apparently changing, some of which you may not have noticed.

We are starting to hear much used for many, as in there weren’t much people there, and there’s too much discussions. This is still rare, and usually only spoken, but because a lot of can easily be used instead of both much and many by all of us, having one expression to cover both environments is not new.

People are no longer saying is concerned in expressions like As far as money, I never seem to have enough. This is now well established, although relevant contexts are not particularly frequent.

We are gaining an apparently excrescent verb in expressions like The point is, is that we don’t know the answer. The double be is now heard from presidents and the hoi polloi alike, even if grammarians are not quite sure what the function of the extra verb is.

Because, for more and more people, prince and prints sound just the same, we find that incidence and incidents sound the same, and the two get confused. As a result, we have the new plural incidences, meaning ‘‘more than one incident’’.

For many years, foreigners have thought that New Zealanders were saying pen when they were really saying pan. But now there is a pair where New Zealanders themselves seem to be confused. They use then instead of than. You have to listen carefully to pick it