Quote:
Originally Posted by kazbates
As DaleDe has already stated, English is very dynamic. New words come along, old words fade out through lack of use. Even between English speaking countries you will find a diverse use and spelling of words. What might be a common usage or spelling here in the US would not be in the UK. Generally, when I finish typing a post and before I submit it, I run spell checker. If I am quoting someone from the UK, the spell checker may find a word that it thinks is spelled incorrectly but is, in actuality, spelled correctly for the original poster. My spell checker is set for US English.
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"English is very dynamic" seems like a questionable truism to me.
The fact that various blobs of speakers adopt more words from other languages than usual doesn't make the language itself dynamic... particularly since most of those words never make it into broad/general use.
Furthermore talking about "the English language" is becoming increasingly a misnomer. It's really "the English languages". Mutual intelligibility between British and American, Australian and American, Indian and American dialects can increasingly depend on the subject matter and the willingness of both speakers to try to accommodate the other one.
Ultimately "dynamism" in a language is presumably another way of referring to "speed of language change". I don't think historically English is a great speeder in terms of language change, and while one might argue that the separation into dialects/languages is suggestive of the speed increasing, I think it rather has to do with the fact that all the dialects are going in somewhat different directions... not so much that they are going faster than the language historically has.
- Ahi