You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Contemporary language change — the changes happening in English right now — is among the richest areas for A-Level analysis, and not by accident: the AQA Paper 2 essay frequently sets a question whose stimulus is recent, and the unseen data you may be asked to analyse is often contemporary (a tweet, a text exchange, a news comment, a piece of advertising). This lesson is therefore less about learning a new body of facts than about turning the frameworks developed in earlier lessons — word-formation processes, semantic change, grammaticalisation, Aitchison's metaphors, Milroy and Milroy's complaint tradition — onto live, observable material. The great advantage of contemporary data is that you can see the change in motion: where the loss of inflections has to be reconstructed from old manuscripts, the spread of quotative like or the coining of doomscrolling is happening in front of you and can be analysed directly.
The lesson examines four engines of present-day change — technology, globalisation, social movements, and broader cultural change — and then evaluates the competing perspectives on whether what they are producing represents progress, decay, or simply the natural evolution of a living language. The single most important interpretive stance, carried over from the attitudes lesson, is to resist the moral panic. Almost every contemporary change attracts a wave of "crumbling castle" and "infectious disease" complaint — that texting is ruining literacy, that Americanisms are corrupting British English, that emoji are killing the written word — and the analyst's task is to treat those complaints as data about attitudes rather than as accurate descriptions. David Crystal is the indispensable authority here, and his research recurs throughout because it directly contradicts the popular claim that the digital age is degrading English.
Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) is any form of communication that takes place through or is facilitated by computers and digital devices, including email, instant messaging, social media, video calls, and online forums.
David Crystal, in Language and the Internet (2001, 2nd edition 2006), argued that the internet has created a genuinely new medium of communication — neither speech nor writing, but something in between, which he termed "Netspeak." Crystal identified five key internet-related varieties:
| Variety | Features |
|---|---|
| Variable formality; blends features of letters and conversation; can be formal or informal depending on context | |
| Chat groups / forums | More informal; turn-taking resembles conversation; use of emoticons/emoji |
| Virtual worlds / gaming | Specialised vocabulary; role-play register; rapid abbreviation |
| The Web | Hypertext; multimodal (text + image + video); new genres (blogs, wikis) |
| Instant messaging | Highly informal; abbreviations; emoji; conversational features in written form |
Crystal argued that CMC is not "debased" or "corrupt" language but a creative adaptation of language to a new medium. Each variety has its own conventions, and competent users switch between them depending on context — demonstrating sophisticated code-switching ability.
Crystal's Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 (2008) directly challenged the widespread belief that texting is destroying literacy. His key findings include:
| Claim | Crystal's Evidence |
|---|---|
| "Texting is full of abbreviations" | Only 10% of text messages contain abbreviations; most are written in standard English |
| "Texting damages spelling" | Research shows a positive correlation between texting frequency and spelling ability |
| "Texting abbreviations are new" | Many abbreviations predate texting: IOU (1618), SWALK (early 20th century), Xmas (16th century) |
| "Young people are the worst offenders" | Adults use text abbreviations more than children; children use standard spelling more often |
| "Texting replaces reading and writing" | Texting adds to the amount of reading and writing young people do; it does not replace other forms |
Crystal concluded that texting requires and develops phonological awareness — you need to understand how a word sounds in order to abbreviate it (for example, gr8 requires knowing that the "-eight" of great sounds like ate, and l8r depends on the same insight). Abbreviation, far from being a symptom of ignorance, is a sophisticated language game with deep historical roots: Crystal points out that initialisms such as IOU are centuries old, that Xmas uses a Greek-derived abbreviation dating back hundreds of years, and that abbreviating is something literate cultures have always done. The moral panic about "text-speak", then, repeats the exact pattern Aitchison and the Milroys describe — a new practice associated with the young is recast as a threat to the language, on the basis of feeling rather than evidence.
A further point worth making is that the technology itself has changed the data. The heavily abbreviated "txt spk" of the early 2000s was partly a response to the constraints of multi-tap keypads and per-message character limits and costs. With smartphones, predictive text, and unlimited messaging, much of that abbreviation has actually receded — a reminder that contemporary change is fast-moving and that examples must be handled with an awareness of their moment. This is itself an analytically mature observation: the "crisis" of texting was in part a technological artefact, and it faded as the technology changed.
Social media platforms (Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Reddit) have created new linguistic practices:
| Feature | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Hashtags | Words or phrases prefixed with # to mark topics or movements | #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, #ThrowbackThursday |
| New word meanings | Existing words acquire new senses | troll (provocative commenter), viral (widely shared), catfish (fake identity), ghost (disappear from contact) |
| New word formations | Platform-specific coinages | tweet, retweet, subtweet, doom-scrolling, doomscrolling |
| Register blending | Formal and informal registers mixed; public/private boundaries blurred | CEO using emoji in official communications |
| Multimodality | Meaning conveyed through text + image + video + sound + emoji | Memes as a form of communication |
| Brevity conventions | Platform constraints shape language (e.g., Twitter's character limit) | Compression, ellipsis, abbreviation |
| Emoji and emoticons | Visual symbols supplement or replace verbal communication | Used for tone, emphasis, irony, identity |
Social media is a particularly fertile site of contemporary change because it sits, as Crystal argued of internet language generally, between speech and writing — it has the permanence and visibility of writing but the spontaneity, informality, and turn-taking of conversation. This hybrid character drives much of what is linguistically novel about it. Semantic change in progress is unusually easy to observe: troll, viral, catfish, ghost, and cancel have all acquired new senses within living memory through metaphor and extension, and a candidate who can name the process (metaphorical extension, semantic broadening) as well as the example is demonstrating AO1 method, not just spotting slang. Word-formation is equally visible — retweet and subtweet by affixation, doomscrolling by compounding, selfie by clipping-plus-suffix — and the key point to make is that these are the same processes that have built English vocabulary for over a thousand years, simply applied to new cultural material. Emoji, meanwhile, raise a genuinely new question: are they becoming a kind of paralinguistic punctuation, supplying in writing the tone of voice and facial expression that speech conveys directly? Treating emoji as a serious object of analysis, rather than dismissing them, is the descriptivist move.
English is now the world's dominant lingua franca, used as a common language between speakers of different native languages. This raises important questions about ownership, variation, and standardisation.
Barbara Seidlhofer (b. 1953) and Jennifer Jenkins (b. 1950) have studied how English is used as a lingua franca — that is, between non-native speakers. Key findings from the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) include:
| Feature of ELF Communication | Example |
|---|---|
| Dropping the third-person -s | "She think it is important" — widely understood despite non-standard form |
| Interchangeable use of relative pronouns | "The company who/which/that..." — no communication breakdown |
| Non-use of articles | "I went to university" / "I went to the university" — both understood |
| Innovative word formation | to informate (inform), discuss about — logical extensions of English patterns |
Jenkins argues that traditional notions of "correct" English based on native-speaker norms are inappropriate for ELF contexts. If English is now used far more between non-native speakers than between native ones — Mandarin aside, the typical conversation in English worldwide may not involve a single native speaker — then judging that conversation against British or American norms is both unrealistic and, in her view, a form of linguistic imperialism that privileges the historical owners of the language over its current majority of users.
This connects to Braj Kachru's influential Three Circles model, which is essential exam vocabulary. Kachru divides the English-speaking world into the Inner Circle (countries where English is the first language, such as the UK and USA, which traditionally "owned" the norms), the Outer Circle (countries where English is an established second language with official status, often post-colonial, such as India and Nigeria, which are developing their own norms), and the Expanding Circle (countries where English is widely learned as a foreign language, such as China and Brazil). The model is not merely descriptive; it functions as a political intervention, because by placing all three circles on one diagram it challenges the assumption that Inner-Circle speakers hold the only legitimate English while everyone else merely borrows it. Used together, Kachru's circles and Jenkins's ELF research let you argue that English is pluralising into World Englishes — many legitimate varieties — rather than radiating outward from a single correct centre. Hedge the detail appropriately, but the conceptual point is secure and powerful.
American English exerts enormous influence on British English and other varieties through cultural exports (film, television, music, technology, social media):
| Feature | American Form | Traditional British Form | Status in British English |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vocabulary | movie, apartment, sidewalk, cookie, truck | film, flat, pavement, biscuit, lorry | Some adopted; some resisted |
| Spelling | color, center, organize | colour, centre, organise | Resisted in formal BrE; -ize accepted by OED |
| Grammar | I just ate, Did you eat yet? | I've just eaten, Have you eaten yet? | Simple past spreading in BrE |
| Pronunciation | Rhotic /r/; /t/ flapping | Non-rhotic; /t/ fully released | Some American features spreading (especially among young speakers) |
| Idiom | Can I get a coffee? | Can I have a coffee? | Can I get now common in BrE |
The influence is not purely one-directional. British English has also influenced American English, particularly through prestige cultural forms (BBC programming, the British literary tradition, British music), so the relationship is one of exchange, not simple conquest. The most sophisticated point to make about Americanisation is that many supposed "Americanisms" are in fact older British forms that America retained while Britain innovated away from them. The rhotic /r/ of General American, discussed in the phonology lesson, is one example; the use of gotten as the past participle of get is another — it was standard in seventeenth-century English, survived in North America, and was lost in Britain, so when British speakers complain that gotten is a vulgar American import they are unwittingly objecting to their own older usage. Recognising that British and American English have diverged from a shared pool — each sometimes keeping what the other dropped — is far more accurate, and far more impressive, than the popular narrative of pure American corruption. The complaint about Americanisation, like the complaint about texting, is best analysed as a contemporary instance of the complaint tradition, often carrying an undertone of anxiety about American cultural power rather than any real linguistic harm.
Globalisation and migration also produce change within Britain, through the language contact of diverse urban communities. Multicultural London English (MLE) — discussed in the phonology lesson — is the leading example: a multiethnolect that has emerged within a generation in diverse inner-city areas, drawing on Caribbean creoles, South Asian and West African languages, and traditional London speech, and spoken across ethnic boundaries rather than by any single group. MLE is contemporary change at its most visible, generating new vocabulary, new vowel qualities, and even new grammar (the use of man as a first-person pronoun). Closely related is code-switching — the alternation between languages or varieties within a single conversation or even a single sentence — which is not a sign of linguistic confusion but a skilled resource that multilingual and bidialectal speakers use to signal identity, audience, and solidarity. A bilingual Londoner who moves between English and Punjabi, or a speaker who shifts between MLE and Standard English depending on who they are talking to, is displaying more linguistic competence, not less. Treating these contact phenomena as creative and rule-governed, rather than as decline or "broken English", is the descriptivist position and the one the specification rewards.
One of the most distinctive features of contemporary change is that a significant part of it is consciously driven by social movements advocating more inclusive terminology. This marks a real difference from earlier eras: where the loss of inflections or the Great Vowel Shift happened below anyone's awareness and at no one's instigation, much present-day lexical and grammatical change is deliberate, organised, and openly debated. That makes it especially rich material, because the change and the reaction to the change are happening simultaneously and in public, giving you both the linguistic data and the attitudinal data in a single phenomenon.
| Traditional Form | Inclusive Alternative | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| chairman | chair, chairperson | Avoids assuming the role is male |
| fireman, policeman | firefighter, police officer | Gender-neutral job titles |
| he (generic) | they (singular) | Avoids assuming male as default; inclusive of non-binary identities |
| ladies and gentlemen | everyone, colleagues, folks | Inclusive of non-binary people |
| Mrs/Miss | Ms | Does not define women by marital status |
| boyfriend/girlfriend | partner | Inclusive of all relationship types |
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.