Yeah it’s true, English is becoming informal

Growing online influence and use of Americanisms streamlining language and giving jargon the elbow

THE English language is getting more informal in the UK and some traditional ways of speaking are “on the brink of extinction”, say experts behind a “frequency dictionary” of British English.

They analysed more than 100 million words in spoken language, academia, newspapers and online e-language and found the word “yeah” is the 39th most common word, used 2,767 times per million words. In contrast, the more formal “yes” came in at 150th, and was four times less frequently used. “The” was found to be the most common word overall, followed by “be", then “and".

Vaclav Brezina, a professor of corpus linguistics at Lancaster University, and his colleague Dr Dana Gablasova spent two years compiling a book on the 5,000 most frequently used words.

They found that just 2,000 words make up four fifths of the used language and that American culture, as well as online lingo, is altering the vernacular.

“If there’s one generalisation that we can make based on all this data, it is that over time, British English has become much more informal,” Prof Brezina told The Telegraph. “And we can see that in news reporting, we can see that in academic writing, we can see that even in official documents.”

He added an increasing desire and need for people to communicate clearly was eradicating superfluous jargon and streamlining parlance.

“If that means shrinking of some of the vocabulary, that might be the sort of collateral damage you might experience,” said Prof Brezina.

One formal aspect now almost exclusively a thing of the past is the use of modal verbs. “Verbs like ‘must’, ‘may’ or ‘shall’ are really on the verge of extinction,” he said. “Certain segments of the language are declining, but obviously new words, new expressions, new spelling and innovations come in. It’s always a trade-off.”

Online language has had a considerable role in changing language, with “LOL”, “u” and other terms skewing the data. “Awesome", for example, is mentioned seven times as often in e-language than in spoken language and “like”, “dunno” and “innit” are examples of modern words being prominent in one form of language and becoming more pervasive in society’s wider glossary.

Prof Brezina will work next on a dataset of American English. “We will soon be in a good position to compare these varieties of English and how they influence each other and be in a position to trace some of the sources of Americanisms in British English,” he said.