Chillaxed Syntax: Is Language Becoming More Informal?
I recently visited Paris, to enjoy some athletic events and a lot of polyglot crowds, and stayed in an area that is still known as the Quartier Latin. During the Middle Ages, it was popular with students, who were taught to speak not in their native dialects, nor even in some elevated form of French, but in straight-up Classical Latin.
That particular age passed away in the Renaissance (though French did not become the official language of France until 1539), but linguistic snobbery at elite universities was not going anywhere. Well into the 20th Century, students at Oxford and Harvard were taught artificial upper-class accents to mark their fine breeding. To some degree, accent snobbery does still exist, especially in England. However, to most people today, caring so much about formality seems bizarre.
Most of us grew up addressing teachers, coaches, and other adults by their surnames. Traditionally, that would remain the default throughout one’s life, save for friends and relatives. But try to recall the last time you addressed someone at work by anything other than his or her first name. As someone who graduated in 2019, I almost never have.
Even regional accents, long the bugbear of polite society, have begun to peek in. The BBC, whose programmes did more than any Oxford don to level out English accents in the 20th Century, now allows hosts to vary from Received Pronunciation. Across the Pond, things have always been less posh, and seem to be getting ever more so. When my boss at a Wall Street bank asked a Texan coworker to stop calling us “y’all” in meetings, I was surprised that most of my colleagues found that unreasonably snobbish. Things obviously vary by industry (e.g., academia, politics, the military) and geography, but in general, work and society generally has gotten a lot less formal in recent decades.
This trend is not exclusive to English. In German and Dutch, the formal terms of address, Sie and u respectively, are increasingly uncommon. Korean has fully seven different levels of formality, each with its own vocabulary and verb endings (in response to a series of crashes in the 1980s, Korean Air mandated English as the language of the cockpit, because they realised that the crew had been linguistically incapable of criticising their pilots). Today, however, the “very formally polite” level is mainly confined to religion and historical dramas, save for north of the border, where it is still the usual way to address Kim Jong Un. Even the second-highest often falls away over the course of a conversation between (generally male) strangers. Likewise, in Chinese, xiansheng used to be a title of reverence (cognate with Japanese sensei), but now is basically equivalent to “mister.”
Formality has even eroded at the most august pinnacles of society. The Catholic Church’s transition from Latin to vernacular mass in the 1960s was a seminal moment for the Church (although, interestingly enough, Latin masses have surged in popularity in recent years). When Pope Benedict XVI chose to announce his abdication in Latin in 2011, one Italian journalist got the scoop before everyone else because she was the only Vatican reporter who understood him.
In the same year, in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima tsunami and nuclear disaster, Emperor Akihito addressed the nation in modern (albeit highly formal) Japanese. It stood in sharp contrast to his father Hirohito’s radio address in 1945, which was in “jewelled” language so archaic and baroque that few of his subjects even understood that they had surrendered (“The military situation has developed in a way not necessarily to Japan’s advantage…”).
So, why all the informality? Are we just getting lazy, or ruder? Part of it surely does reflect broader social attitudes. It does seem notable that formal terms of address are being chipped away faster in highly egalitarian Northern Europe, while French vous and Spanish usted prove more robust. When I did a clerkship in Pakistan, I would not have dreamed of addressing my seniors by their given names. Justices were generally “[Surname]-sab,” which the British traditionally translated as “Lord [Surname].”
In supposedly communist China, people maintain the formal habit of addressing others in the third person (“Would Mr. Li like a spot of tea?”), which imperial officials would have found entirely appropriate. So, while informality is not necessarily a Western phenomenon, it does seem to dovetail with (small-l, small-p) liberal politics.
Another part of the issue may be that people now write and broadcast for a wider audience. When it was only a literate minority who consumed mass media, styles were understandably more elevated. To take a familiar example, Charles Dickens, whose prose bewilders even educated readers today, was considered a popular (rather than posh) writer less than two centuries ago. Consider a passage from A Tale of Two Cities:
“Those were drinking days, and most men drank hard. So very great is the improvement Time has brought about in such habits, that a moderate statement of the quantity of wine and punch which one man would swallow in the course of a night, without any detriment to his reputation as a perfect gentleman, would seem, in these days, a ridiculous exaggeration. The learned profession of the law was certainly not behind any other learned profession in its Bacchanalian propensities; neither was Mr. Stryver, already fast shouldering his way to a large and lucrative practice, behind his compeers in this particular, any more than in the drier parts of the legal race.”
Today, Twitter’s 280-character limit would force us to come up with a simpler way to call lawyers alcoholics. Social media has likely also helped narrow the gap between published writing and off-the-cuff speech, among other ways that smarter technology has enabled us to be linguistically lazier.
We have even normalised, to some extent, the nastiest words language can furnish. Swearing has, of course, always existed, but the decline of entertainment industry decency standards, and the proliferation of immediate publishing through social media, has helped soften our horror of them. Just over fifty years ago, it was illegal to print the word “damn” in the UK. Respectable papers still avoid naughty language, but it slips in in their podcasts. On the other hand, it should noted that, since they decided avoid writing out “the N-word” in 1995, the New York Times helped create a linguistic taboo as severe as any we have ever had in English.
One thing that will probably not have much influence is government policy. Ideologues have tried to shape language for centuries. Perhaps the most notable example in English was when 17th Century religious fundamentalists tried to phase out the formal “you” in favour of the informal “thou,” to emphasise brotherhood in Christ. People were so annoyed by them that the opposite happened, and “thou” now exists only in historical movies and some weird schools in Pennsylvania.
It remains to be seen whether the modern insistence on using “they” as a gender-neutral singular will catch on, or suffer the same backlash. In 2017, liberal French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe made the analogous movement for gender-neutral French illegal. But France does have a checkered history in this department. During the French Revolution, using the aristocratic vous or addressing someone as monsieur rather than citoyen (“citizen”) was punishable by death. But people were so keen to be unfriendly that they risked the guillotine to preserve it.
An analogous movement in Mao’s China tried to make everyone address each other as tongshi, “comrade.” But today, not even Xi Jinping can make people stop using the word as a joke term for gay lovers. Meanwhile, their tongshimen in the Soviet Union abandoned early thoughts of democratising Russian. They eventually adopted the policy of using the informal tui to disrespect political prisoners, the same way noblemen did to commoners in the bad old days.
As we have explored, however, language can change plenty all on its own. Once upon a time, Latin speakers got so lazy and enamoured with slang that they ended up speaking entirely new languages. Modern communication technology makes that sort of result very unlikely today. But such technology can also facilitate linguistic trends.
As television took off in the mid-20th Century, American broadcasters made the conscious decision to favour a down-to-earth Midwestern accent, rather than the one of the Northeastern elite (see Mr. Buckley at the top). As a result, a huge majority of people across the vast country speak with what is now the standard American accent. Today’s new media work differently. But, if TikTok is any indicator, it’s giving that language in the future could get hella chill — dead-ass.
It is difficult to predict the future of language. Social trends and attitudes can change. Erosion of social barriers and stodgy grammatical vestiges is no tragedy, and some trends that start in fast-and-loose colloquialism can evolve to add new richness to a language. But in pretty much all cultures, some much more than others, language cues play a vital role in framing a social relationship. It seems like most people agree that there should be a place for that sort of nuance. After all, if we’re on a first-name basis with everybody, how do we know who our friends are?
