ABSTRACT
English is slithering away, judging from complaints in books and newpapers. A tradition of worry dates back centuries: ‘I do here . . . complain . . . that our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions’ moaned Jonathan Swift in 1712 (Swift 1966, p. 107). Eighteenth-century writers perhaps had some excuse for their pessimism, because relatively little was then known about language change. Swift and his colleagues feared that their own work might not survive unless they could somehow halt English in its tracks.
