Parturient Mother-Tongue

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 316, 13 July 1945, Page 8

Parturient Mother-Tongue

URING the golden age of Rome, | Latin was the language of the civilised world: after the dark ages it still | survived in the different countries of the former Empire, but differentiated into the various Romance languages. To-day the English tongue has spread over the world not very differently from the Latin of old. Will its fate, 1000 years from now, be the same-itself to survive as a classical dead language, possibly still spoken in the lecture-room, the pulpit, and the embassy, while a number of virile vernaculars, derived from it, flourish in different parts of the world, each with a living literature of its \own, and each unintelligible to the others? This was the speculation thrown up in Professor Arnold Wall's Winter Course talk, "The Future of English," at 1YA recently. History did not necessarily repeat itself, said the Professor. The newspaper, the cinema and the radio were powerful standardising instruments whose influence was still not fully tested. Yet if the radio is to be the force that standardises the English of the future, before we comfort ourselves we should perhaps first examine the statistics and see how many hang nightly on the lips of Dad and Dave for every one who listens to the impeccable accents of the announcers of the BBC.