Mark Abley

If you perk up your ears for a bit, you will notice that English is not the language it once was. Odd terms, new phrases, and foreign invasions are changing English from the inside out. The explosion of the Internet and small-scale news have given localisms a chance to flourish on a global scale. It took the word “teenager” roughly sixty years to become mainstream, but now noob and lol are commonplace after only a decade of use. Mark Abley’s The Prodigal Tongue traces the historical show more journey of the English and project many possible changes the language could take.

Right now, English and its many variations are swarming around world, threatening to become the universal language. It’s already the official language of pilots, the World Bank, and even OPEC. But this comes at a cost to the language itself. In its ambition to become the lingua franca of the world, the world affects it in many small and large ways. Each new country that takes on English changes it to suit their purposes, and Abley shows us how this affects both the speakers and speech. Singapore English is an odd mish-mash of local dialects and general English terms. Japanese English, while sometime mocked when egregious mistranslations occur, is creating a row because it is displacing traditional kanji writing. The Spanglish of Southern California is leading to new debates about whether the United States should decree English as the official language.

Abley’s gusto for new words and Englishes is almost childlike and Zen at the same time. He is not one of those linguists who cry out for purity and put down neologisms. Every time he sees a new construction, it is a chance to investigate in what ways the language is changing and what that means on a larger scale. If you are a native English speaker, there are times when you may get a little defensive when Abley proposes that all English variations are both valid and good, but his overall feeling is that each new English offers a way for use to communicate with those we haven’t been able to before. And that can’t be too bad of a thing. A very engaging read. show less

Despite the subtitle, author Mark Abley is never foolish enough to even attempt to predict what the future of the English language is going to look like. Instead, he considers what's happening to English across the world right now -- or, rather, what was happening to it in 2008 when this book was published, which is not quite the same thing, judging by the fact that a few of his examples of edgy new slang already seem a little passé. And what is happening to it? Well, it's constantly show more colliding with and influencing other languages, and being influenced by them in turn, on a larger scale than ever before. (And with English, which was always been something of a pack rat tongue, that's really saying something.) It 's showing the effects of the jargon and dialects of minority groups and subcultures becoming mainstream, as with the spread of urban African-American speech patterns via the medium of hip-hop. And, then, of course there's the internet, which is constantly doing strange new things to the way we communicate. Abely looks at various examples of all these changes, and at the idea of language change generally (which is something people have been describing and decrying at least since the invention of the printing press). He also includes a chapter on how science fiction writers have dealt with, or failed to deal with, the idea of language change. I found that one particularly intriguing, but also frustrating, because his discussion of it is very lightly sketched, and it left me with the realization that I really, really wanted to read a whole book on that subject.

It's pretty engaging stuff, if you're at all interested in the topic of language and its evolution. Abley's writing is highly readable, and I very much appreciated the way he simultaneously clearly understands the desire to preserve language and the cultural traditions it can represent, and also fully and non-judgmentally embraces the joyful innovation that takes place on the edge of linguistic change. show less

Even better than his Prodigal Tongue, Mark Abley's explorations of diminishing (and the very occasional not-yet-diminishing) languages fascinated me from beginning (aboriginal Australian) to end (Welsh). The political implications of Mohawk and Iroquois, the literary ones of Proven��al and Occitan, the religious ones of Yiddish and Hebrew (and Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Proven��al and Judeo-Persian, of which I had heard of only the first), are endlessly intricate and packed with show more meaning and possibility.

Imagine the philosophical posers that cultures with several different forms of first-person plural (they and I but not you; two others and I and you; more than two others and I and not you, and so forth) could present to the Indo-European language speaker. Try to grasp the mindset of a someone whose speech relies on state of being as well as, or separate from, location and linear time. Mourn the knowledge that would be lost if the words for plants and their uses specific to pinpoint locations on the edges of maps were forgotten. Wonder how four different words for pre-dawn light can remain useful if their speakers sleep indoors. show less

I didn't find the book groundbreaking, since I already knew most of its information (to be fair, I've been interested in language and linguistics for many years). However, I still enjoyed Abley's ability to present thoughtful portraits of the way we use English and how it is swiftly changing. He doesn't provide any answers about the future of English because...well, is anyone equipped to answer that? What he does is pull together many threads and give them to his readers in a pleasant, show more digestible package. In particular, his descriptions of people learning English as a second language and the anxiety they then feel about their native language resonated with me, as someone who grew up in a multilingual household.

I recently had an argument with a family member over the validity of English dialects and creoles. His view was that deviations from Standard English were a sign of poor education and low intelligence (yes, I am still angry at him for saying that). The funny thing is, he grew up in Singapore. In any case, I want to give him (and others like him) this book. Maybe it'll change their minds. show less