English is dominant in a way that no language has ever been before. It is vastly unclear to me what actual mechanism could uproot English given conditions as they are.
—The International Herald Tribune, April 10, 2007

Posted on April 12, 2007

Most of us are less aware that language, too, is change. All human speech varieties are always in a constant process of slow transformation into what eventually will be a new language entirely.
—The Power of Babel, 2002

Posted on November 18, 2003

Language ... change is still going on every day in all languages. If we could transport ourselves in a time machine to America of the year 4000, our first problem would not be the quaint cultural misunderstandings so entertaining in movies like Woody Allen's Sleeper, but the fact that we wouldn't understand a word anyone was saying, even though they would consider themselves to be speaking "English." Moreover, new slang and technical terms would be the least of our worries — more to the point, the very sounds, structure, and word meanings of English would have changed so much that we would have to learn it again as a new tongue.
—The Word on the Street, 1998

Posted on October 9, 2003

We cannot stop language from changing, and so there will always be things that "people are saying lately." The people reinterpreting the language will naturally tend to be young, and thus high-spirited and flippant, but we must not let this mislead us into thinking of the innovations as rambunctious "breaking of rules," because this is the sole way language has been changing since time immemorial.
—The Word on the Street, 1998

Posted on December 6, 1999

Underlying the truth about dialects and casual speech is a fundamental fact about language, with which we must make a deep and lasting peace: Language is always changing....The changes are so relentless and so profound that there is no society in the world in which people could converse with their ancestors from more than about a thousand years back. In this amount of time, and usually much less, any language develops into a new one.
—The Word on the Street, 1998

Posted on November 3, 2000

Any language is always and forever on its way to changing into a new one, with many of the sounds, word meanings, and sentence patterns we process as "sloppy" and "incorrect" being the very things that will constitute the "proper" language of the future.
—The Word on the Street, 1998

Posted on October 23, 1998

We are told that because it is a plural pronoun, they must not be used to refer to single persons because it "doesn't make sense." However, the fact is that today, they is indeed both a singular and a plural pronoun, as indicated by the fact that all English speakers use it so. They is singular as well as plural for the simple reason that has been a refrain in this book — the language has changed and made it so. The idea that they is only a plural pronoun is an illusion based on the fallacy of treating the English of one thousand years ago as if it was somehow hallowed, rather than just one arbitrary stage of an endless evolution over time.
—The Word On the Street, 1998

Posted on August 11, 1998