ENGLISH TODAY AND

TOMORROWMAIN CHANGES

CHANGES IN VOCABULARY Many new words continue to be coined

from Greek and Latin morphemes for use in science and technology, and some of these get into the general vocabulary like cosmonaut

In the general vocabulary, affixation is still one of the favourite methods of word-formation. Fashionable prefixes in recent years include audio- (audiovisual), mini- (minivan), and neo- (neoNazi)

Compounding also continues, especially for the formation of new nouns. The influence of the Women`s Lib movement has led to the coining of compounds like spokesperson, in which person replaces the suffix –man.

Another popular second element in recent times has been –centre, JobCentres (Employment Exchanged), music centre, resource centre.

New words are also produced by shortening, like brill, from brilliant, and vibes from vibrations. Loans are not a major source of new words, but a few continue to drift in, e.g. from French has come discoteque

CHANGES IN PRONUNCIATION Long vowels /i:/ and /u:/ are often

diphthongized to /ii/ and /uu/ Many speakers use / / instead of /i/ in

unstressed syllables of kitchen, system,women

Words pronounced with /a:/ instead of /ei/: e.g. apparatus, status and stratum, also data

CHANGES IN GRAMMAR More and most have been spreading to

adjectives of one syllable: e.g. “more keen”

Tendency for people to use auxiliary “may” instead of “might”

“dare” and “need” are ceasing to be auxiliaries and are coming to be used as ordinary lexical verbs

In some non- standard speech, the same thing has happened to the auxiliaries “ought to” and used to”

CHANGE OF MEANING One common cause of semantic change

in our time appears to be formal influence: the form of a word causes it to be confused with another word, which influences its meaning. Such a development is common when a word moves out of a specialized field of discourse into the general vocabulary.

Public speakers or journalists replace the word “now” by such expressions as “in this day and age”, “at the present time”, and “as of now”. The same thing happens to whole phrases.