Dodgy dialects exterminating our slanguage
ENGLISH FACES ONGOING BATTLE TO SURVIVE
★ STREET slang is set to become the main dialect spoken in Britain, as we reported yesterday.
Experts reckon inner-city London chat may even outstrip regional variations such as Geordie, Brummie and Scouse.
★ But how much do you know about the English language? NADINE LINGE has 15 facts…
1 English has its origins in Old High German and Old Norse. Modern English started being used in the 14th century and the closest language to English is Frisian, spoken in Holland.
2 The oldest words in the English language are I, we, who, three and two. They go back at least 10,000 years.
3 English is the world’s most spoken language but more people speak it as a second language than first. Around 1.1billion speak it – but fewer than 400million have it as their first language.
4 Dr Samuel Johnson wrote the first comprehensive dictionary in 1755, setting out the rules of English grammar and spelling. It took Johnson, played by Robbie Coltrane in Blackadder, above, nine years to compile.
5 Research has found the most used adjective in the English language is “good” while the most common noun is “time”.
E is the most used letter while “I” and “you” are the most common words.
6 “I am” is the shortest complete sentence in English. A pangram is a sentence which contains every letter, famously “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
7 The longest word ispneu mono ultra microscopic si li co volcano conios is–a type of lung disease caused by inhaling dust. The word has 45 letters.
8 Ghost words are words which exist in a dictionary but have never been used, for example “dord” which appeared in the dictionary for eight years.
9 Crutch words refer to those we use to give us time to think, despite having no meaning. Examples include “like”, “literally”, “actually” and “basically.”
10 A new word is added to the dictionary every two hours, totalling around 4,000 per year. Recent additions to the Oxford English Dictionary include “trigger warning” “vaccine passport” and “dinosaur hunter”.
11 The word “SWIMS” reads as “SWIMS” even when turned upside down – this is called an ambigram, meaning a word which retains its meaning when viewed from different directions.
12 While a palindrome is a word which reads the same forwards and backwards, such as
DO. NOT. BLAME. US! IT. IS. ALL. ALIEN.TO. THE. MASTER. RACE.
noon, radar and madam. A sentence can be a palindrome such as: “A dog! A panic in a pagoda.”
13 A portmanteau is a word which blends two to make a new one, such as “hangry” – hungry and angry.
14 William Shakespeare, left, provided the first recorded use of 1,700 words in his plays and poems, many of which he invented himself. Some still in use today include gossip.
15 According to Countdown star Susie Dent, the average person knows and uses 20,000 words plus an additional 40,000 which are known but not used.