Is English in DECLINE? Gen Alpha, Neopronouns. A linguist’s take | pt. 2

#english #neopronouns #genalpha #grammar
Intro: 00:00 - 02:24
Gen Alpha & reading, writing, comprehension: 02:24 - 05:17
AI, autocorrect & use it or lose it: 05:17 - 07:39
Neopronouns: 07:39 - 09:01
Is English in decline?: 09:01 - 09:47
Part 1: • Is English in DECLINE?...

[@skunkybudtoker9092]

My sister showed me my nephew's job application, he wrote "bcuz". My sister is a teacher and I gave her a real hard time on that one.

[@AlesMicik]

There is no fucking way 😅

[@24framedavinci39]

Well, a certain group that has a foothold in western public education believes in equity. That pulls everyone down to the liwest common denominator. Testing and grading have been dumbed down, if not completely removed. This will just further widen the gap between the lower and upper classes. I can see it in my family. I have one cousin who has a child who is an iPad baby. They are not well-off. Another cousin who is upper class spends all of his free time with his children. They rarely get screen time. He even coaches his kid's soccer team. It's difficult to be the one in the family to break that cycle. When certain groups blame outside sources instead of having people look inwards, that will only make the journey to improvement a more difficult one than it already was.

[@edwardpaddock2528]

The Eloi and the Morlocks.

[@jameskreth3681]

Great video. I get excited to learn more when I see that you have a new video. I'm looking forward for your future ones too. I appreciate your hard work, research and time you put into your videos.

[@dhruv9744]

Phonetic inconsistency in English makes it more prone to distortion than other languages. 5 different ways to pronounce the same thing + shorter attention spans + faster typing speeds + auto correct + a general shift in the culture towards being more casual than uptight = What’s happening to grammar rn As I typed this I realized I write rn instead of right now. I suppose I’m caught up in it too.

[@shannonstirling1]

I'm loving your commentary on this topic! Your accurate assessment of the 'neo-pronouns' is of particular interest to me. I appreciate your clarity on the fact that asking someone to call you by your 'preferred pronoun' is actually a form of coercive control (my definition, not yours precisely). Well done!

[@user-dx2lg8pm2j]

If you ask me, as long as you are expressive and clear - you are fine. People who require you to speak properly are usually snobs and you don’t need to care about them. In an interview, language makes no difference if you are an engineer, IT professional, doctor, farmer, construction worker or any other specialist- as long as you are understood. If you need to use a new form of language, you can learn quickly. I went from casual English to academic language, then to corporate and have been reading the King James Bible lately, all while English is my second language, and I was not that good with my first language either. Autocorrect levels the playing field between people who can spell and people who can not, that being bad at spelling does not matter. If you are unclear, people will text you back, so the impact is practically nil. Poetry is as alive as ever, it evolved into rap. Many of the influential rappers are not speaking “properly” or grammatically correctly - yet they are very expressive artists. Dk, what will happen to literature, but old books aren’t going anywhere. My bet - kids will adapt, they have worse things to worry about

[@theinformedtoast3377]

Very thought provoking commentary, well done 👍

[@pugil1sttheboxingforce940]

You nailed it once again. It's so sad and frustrating that, with as many universities and schools that we have, the overall literacy level is plummeting.

[@edwardpaddock2528]

It has been plummeting for decades . . I think now, it is hitting bottom.

[@miss_editor]

While I thought this was interesting, I would ask you to think on that section of neopronouns. As your argument there could theoretically be extended to a lazy "All trans people asking for their pronouns to be respected are asking you to mind control yourself into using ~their~ language." I am not saying you have done this, but someone could take the argument you did make and easily pull this out of it. While I think there is an argument around how actionable neopronouns may be, given their lack of general adoption in society, as well as how the neopronoun community has in itself a lot of the foibles associated with youth (not thinking about outcomes or implementation, over precising things, etc.). At its core, advising someone your pronouns is not telling people how to think, it is giving them the correct way to act towards you and the tools to show whether they are going to respect you or not. Its functionally the same as how you may refer to someone you glanced at as "he". Perhaps it's a mix of a short haircut, letterman jacket and hightops that cement the idea in your head. But, she might be a cis butch lesbian and she would then correct you "No, it's she." That person is not telling you how to think, she is telling you how not to be incorrect.

[@themeaningofgender]

I could not agree more. Well done. Thank you.

[@user-ud3iw2il3g]

An interesting take, Lana. Consider expanding your thesis to the Humanities in general. For example, I see once noble stature of the Humanities as headlong in decline at my graduate school. The Humanities are universally mocked. Not a new phenomena. Menken in 1903 observed the shift to "il-liberalism". In the '30's, Northrop Frye further affirmed the rise of anti-intellectualism. Thus, more than a decline in English, in evidence is a shift of educational purpose, in the Humanities, from methods of understanding to embracing the ideologies of belief. This observation expands on your thesis. But the result is exactly the same. Five decades of shift is imperceptible to many. But when observed, the observer is universally condemned. In November of 2019 the great Harold Bloom passed. His passing was celebrated by the "il-liberal crew". To read Frye and Bloom is to embody a noble literary stature, but go deeper. Prior to its decline, my school once required working knowledge of Bishop Berkeley's essay, Kant's critique, and both informal logic and formal propositional calculus. Why?? 1. From Berkeley one reads method used in the discovery of truth. What follows is a scholar's further understanding of how sublimity in virtue and beauty is formed. 2. From Kant, the scholar learns deductive method in discovering foundations of meaning, in language, and the inductive process of the analytic as articulation. 3. From the axioms of set theory the scholar discovers both domain of the ordered pair {a,b} and how truth is constructed from the natural and existential orders. What all this means, Lana, is that the theoretical linguist and the literary critic can observe decline, but the innate elements of language will never change. Greatness in literary expression is condemned, but rubbish in literary expression rises out of the same innate source.... enormity of universal grammar. I'm not disagreeing with you. Rather, your thesis can be expanded by purposeful shift or a return from ideology of belief to method of understanding. Thus, as Cicero said, to speak well one must write well and to write well one must read both deeply and widely in the literary canon :-))

[@carltonace1606]

Your reference to Anna Kareninina is one I recognize immediately. You are talking about when Lev Constantine worked along side the mowers. It is well written, not at all boring, and, as such, it sticks with you. Another example is Herman Melville's Moby Dick. He writes a whole chapter on the whiteness of the whale. His is a little more overwhelming, but it's of such a symbolic nature, both in wording and in length and it's also something that sticks with you.

[@AdventuresofVindalf]

Saeg Hweat? Ye tongue of ye English doth change?

[@bobdelai793]

Thank you for another great, and informative video. I especially loved the enlightenment you gave me on, "Neopronouns" what you said is so obvious, and yet until you put it into your words, I never realized it!

[@andeeanko7079]

Love your content, Lana - and for what it's worth, I'm at the older end of Generation X. PS - as an aspiring fantasy writer, I do indeed paint a scene with words...

[@thitherword]

Lana, have you read The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle? It provides an excellent analysis of the cultural and socio-political drivers that gave rise to our current fascination with controlling language.

[@andrewf.bradley1106]

Also a linguist (PhD). Is English in decline? No.

[@JayBigDadyCy]

Interesting topic. I'm 43 and I'll say my generation had/has a lot of slang and vernacular that got puahed into mainstream. Things I still say today. Internet, and especially gaming culture has a hige impact on speexh trends these days. I mean you'll see sentences like "bro rizzed that girl up no cap" and it's almoylike a different language if you aren't in tune 😂 cool channel. Your hair is amazing and I say that as a straight dude lol.

[@Anakianaj]

Watched both videos back to back so I'll just leave my two cents here. At the heart of language is something even the people in the descriptive camp *and* the people in the prescriptive camp can agree to (at least as far as I'm aware): to communicate people will use whatever method serves the purpose best with the tools available to them. In many ways emojis and gifs do a much better job (more accurate, more precise, more concise and more reliable) when it comes to emotions, relatability and empathy. Many spellings and other grammar rules aren't necessary for intelligibility --- at least not if the (new) concept is known. - Personally, I think that's also perfectly fine. The one thing I'm worried about is that it happens too quickly. Language change has always been something that happens pretty gradually - at least when it comes to the things that stick around. And that is changing. If we look at how different languages have a common ancestor just a few hundred years ago, it doesn't actually seem too unrealistic that we might end up with age dependent sociolects that are no longer mutually intelligible; where someone in their teens and someone in their seventies may not be able to have an unrestricted conversation. -- And this is also where I see the issue with reading/writing skills and grammar. In principle, I don't mind it changing. - But if we end up in a situation where essential knowledge is no longer widely available/acessible because the language in books differs too much from the language in use ... then we, as knowledge-based societies, kinda run into a problem. My native language is German and over the past... I don't actually know but it's certainly been over the course of several decades, there has been a shift. It used to be that "normal German" and "academic's German" were two entirely different beasts. "Academic's German" was used to gatekeep (advanced) knowledge. You weren't supposed to understand it without a degree, without having studied the field. The general consesus: If you don't understand what that text is saying it's you who failed to understand, not the author who failed to explain. This is not the case anymore - or it's at least not nearly as bad as it used to be. There has been an effort to find a middle ground; raise the overall level of "normal German" (which also allows more people to pursue an academic career) and lower the level of "academic's German" (introducing the concept of "as simple as possible, as complicated as needed"; aka "don't overcomplicate it for no reason") so that the gap is bridgeable. .... But given what I hear elsewhere and what I see when I teach (private tutoring though) we might be headed in that direction again. Just this time it's not deliberate gatekeeping but a byproduct of changes happening too fast. And lastly one thing I think isn't at all an issue: the pronouns. First, it's not at all unusual to use language to try to influence how people think. Not going to open the language relativity can of worms but no matter which side you're on, you will be able to agree that the two have an inherent connection. And you absolutely have a right to try to influence how people think about you when they talk about you. I'm no expert on the whole pronouns discussion, so the second point is really just my personal take: I do think that the pronouns that are used for you are pretty much an extension of your name. Just like you can tell people which name you want them to use when referring to you, you can tell them which pronoun you want them to use when referring to you. You wouldn't like it if someone called you by your first name when you repeadedly told them to use your middle name because that's the one you go by. - And I think if you made that point there's not really anyone who would tell you that you're trying to tell them what to do or trying to take away their freedom of thought or expression.

[@badforyourhealth2971]

Pretty soon we'll be talking in the way characters did in the post-apocalypse earth from Cloud Atlas.

[@mp32298]

Ai is for sure the seath of creativity

[@phoenix-sound]

Modern western education is more about indoctrination

[@andrewf.bradley1106]

Brain dead take

[@OdinWannaBe]

Having more word to describe actual social phenomena we can observe is never bad for any language, anyone saying this do not understand how language evolve.

[@1x93cm]

Maybe humans ain't all they are cracked up to be. If an intelligent machine can create amazing art. Amazing music. Amazing stories and pictures. Then fundamentally intelligence can exist without consciousness. It may, in fact be the case, that intelligence flourishes without a conscious body holding it back. Who needs Gen Alpha when we have large language models anyways. This is really too much ado about so much meat.

[@edwardpaddock2528]

More often than no, people are punished for using English correctly.

[@j.cr.1207]

Ohh this is really interesting because now I see that it's happening to more people and in other countries. I'm a teacher, I have 11/12 yo, kids write horribly wrong, like 3rd graders, one third can't correctly use capital letters. They are not able to work in a silent environment and their behavior is appalling. I wish I could film my classes. I have boys rolling on the floor pretending to be dogs. This at a private school where you expect these children to have a certain level of upbringing. It's surreal how academically weak they are, how they don't know how to behave.

[@yesntpittzant4156]

Dont see why people with neopronouns had to catch strays. How were they relevant to your argument?

[@CozyButcher]

English is Cozy's 3rd language, it was difficult to first learn. It seems as if most Americans don't seem to understand the language they're supposed to speak and read natively. It's sad. Perhaps by choice, perhaps by other powers that be.

[@philipcurnow7990]

Grammarly is the McDonald's of word nutrition. A conceipt wrapped up in colonial reductivism and slot machine addiction.

[@andrewf.bradley1106]

Okay, so you are a linguist. Fantastic. Where is the list of references? You have every right to make opinion pieces, but you are resting your authority on your position as a linguist. Is the public meant to trust what you say on that basis alone (e.g. credentialism)? As a video essay, surely 'some' reference to bibliographic material is warranted, no? I dare say that it is obligatory in any serious thoughtpiece on serious topics. Your section on neopronouns was pure conjecture. "I think" "that's a discussion for another time". There's no metalinguistic commentary beyond assumptions about merely one aspect of neopronouns and sociosyntax. No research into the relevance of language (and by extension gendered language) for socialisation and in-groupness (and ofc out-groupness). There's no comment on the fact that we "demand" that our first names (Proper Nouns) are to be respected and used for us. The whole linguistic ideology of deficit is widely studied in sociolinguistics (Ian Cushing is publishing a lot on this lately), and there's not a single reference to this body of research that I have found in the video. Why? As a fellow (socio)linguist, we are in an age of drastic misinformation - including all areas of linguistics. Please use your profile and background more responsibly when educating lay audiences about our field, or at least point them in the direction of reputable studies. That is, of course, if you care about this in the same way that I and many do.

[@mp32298]

Apoiler alert it is

[@annnee6818]

Gen Z and younger millennials don't know there's a plural of woman anymore. It's just the same word. No one says "women" anymore. Yes that's dumb

[@OdinWannaBe]

what ?

[@Dsch28]

interesting commentary, I just think with neopronouns the population having them used is incredibly low, and to me it really doesn't seem to be about control. I think its a harmful view to say that people who go by neopronouns are demanding some sort of crazy effort out of others.

[@andrewf.bradley1106]

It is harmful and massively disingenuous. Children learn the names of 1000 Pokémon without effort lmao, or entire new languages. This is an ideological rejection, not a philological one by the video creator. There's no body of research on this (yet). Neopronouns are extremely niche and definitely in their infancy.