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Why Shakespeare is doomed

full moon
Titania - A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act III, Scene I

This is not a high-tech crime involving time travelling assassins. Shakespeare's death is a long, slow, silent decline that began even as he put quill to paper. And while we hold the knives now, the mortal blow will be dealt in the future. He will then be buried, and then forgotten and the world at large will no longer know of one of the greatest exponents of human genius. That is my prediction.

There is no motive in this crime of the future, just an inevitability based on one undeniable fact. Language changes, and ironically, Shakespeare was himself perhaps the greatest ever at introducing new terms, concepts and metaphors into the language. The very craft he mastered will eventually consign his works to history.

How do I know this? Let me count the ways.

The study of language is an old science, as Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady would attest, and it has revealed much about human prehistory, cultural evolution and the evolution of languages themselves. Just as a palaeontologist or archaeologist can piece together a story from fragments of bone or metal, developing a history or family tree, so too can the linguist search for fossil words or sounds and trace the development of language.

It is easy to see how the romance languages - French, Spanish, Italian, Sardinian, Romanian, Catalan and Portuguese - all emerged from Latin. But further delving has shown that the Germanic family - English, German, Danish - evolved from an unknown Proto-Germanic language. Latin, Proto-Germanic and Proto-Slavic (Russian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian) are among the Indo-European family of languages, and they in turn share more ancient roots with other language groups.


rays of coloured light
Kent - King Lear, Act II, Scene II
If language evolves there must be some mechanism for change, and linguists have a good idea of what that mechanism is. Dr Cynthia Allen from the School of Languages at the Australian National University suggests that language changes with each generation. When we are born, we have no language and must learn it from scratch, and while virtually all babies are told things like 'dog', 'cat' 'Mummy' and 'Daddy', most of our language skills are simply picked up on the run. The more abstract the concept, the less is the likelihood that it will be described to us in detail. We must simply make a guess based on the context. This process works very well, but it is not flawless.

For example, says Dr Allen, the phrase 'willy nilly', which we now take to mean 'any which way' originally had a much different meaning. Willehe-nellehe was an Old English term meaning 'whether he will or whether he won't and implied someone doing something against their wishes - whether they wanted to or not. Over time this concept has been misinterpreted to the point where its meaning is entirely different. Extrapolate this example across the language and you get constant evolution.

But the slightly imperfect transmission of meaning from one generation to the next is far from the only influence on language evolution. Geopolitical events can catalyse enormous and rapid developments, as the English found in the years after the Norman invasion in 1066. After William conquered, says Dr Allen, his language became the language of government and state and we are left with words such as bureaucracy that tell of a time when speakers of French ruled Britain.


But what of the future of English?

marijuana bush
Canterbury - King Henry V, Act I, Scene I

Because of the complexity and messy humanness of the process of language evolution, linguists don't make predictions about what words will be in or out next year, but they can make a number of generalisations. For starters, there are some words that are particularly resistant to change. Dr Allen suggests that some very fundamental nouns such as 'man', 'woman', or 'child' have roots that go way back, and are under little pressure for change. Every child learns these terms early and accurately so our descendants will probably be using very similar sounding words centuries or millennia hence.

Another broad prediction is that English will be spoken by increasing numbers of people for the foreseeable future.

"The future of a language is closely bound up with the influence and prestige of its speakers", says Professor David Crystal, a leading international expert in linguistics. He suggests that English, being the language of the most powerful state on Earth, has a rosy future.

"The role of English has developed to such an extent, unprecedented in world history, that it is difficult to see how it can be dislodged". However, as Professor Crystal goes on to caution, people must once have thought that about Latin.


Countless pebbles
Andronicus - Titus Andronicus, Act V, Scene III
One of the more bizarre potential future scenarios for the English language is that all English speakers, wherever they are in the world, will need to be bilingual in English. That is, they will speak their own local English, and also another English David Crystal calls "World Standard Spoken English".

Bilingualism will be necessary because a language separated by geography or culture - even if it is the same language - will evolve in different directions, until it becomes a series of mutually unintelligible regional dialects. North American English will be very different to British English, which will differ from Australian, South African, Indian and Caribbean English.

These 'new Englishes' will diverge over time in the same way that different languages have always evolved from common roots. At the same time, the theory goes, a World Standard Spoken English will be maintained so that all speakers of English can communicate effectively with each other. Though it sounds unlikely, a similar situation currently exists in China where the several spoken dialects are mutually unintelligible, but written Chinese is understood by all.

But making predictions about the future of the English language is particularly difficult because it stands at a threshold beyond which we cannot see. The threshold is both demographic and technical.

In terms of demography, David Crystal predicts that in just a few years there will be more speakers of English as a second language than native born English speakers, at which point the language will become "open to the winds of linguistic change in totally unpredictable ways". English is fast becoming a truly global language and what that means, nobody can predict with confidence.

2 B or not 2 B...

Radiant spiral pattern
Helena - All's Well that Ends Well, Act I, Scene I

Technologically, the very nature of communication is changing on a daily basis and we are only at the beginning of this revolution. The internet, email and text messaging are tremendously fertile fields for the growth of new words and concepts and because this type of technology changes so quickly it is very difficult to see where it will take the language. On the one hand communication technology exerts pressure for language evolution, but on the other hand, it puts everyone in touch with everyone else, breaking down the barriers of distance and culture which traditionally fuel language change. What will be the outcome? Who can say.

In yet another twist, David Crystal describes the possible impact of instant translation technology. Perhaps in a few years or decades we will all wear the equivalent of Douglas Adams' babel fish, which translates all languages instantaneously. What impact will this have on the evolution of language? There will no longer be a need for an international lingua franca and people will be free to speak in whatever tongue they choose. World Standard English may not be necessary after all.


And so to Shakespeare. The only thing we can say about the future of English is that it will keep evolving but we can't say exactly how. It is clear however that sooner or later the poetry and artistry of the Bard will be lost to all but historians of English, just as the works of Homer are unintelligible to modern Greeks. As Dr Allen says, we already in a sense have to translate Shakespeare in copious footnotes in order to understand it fully. It will inevitably be necessary to completely translate his works and in doing so, lose the incredible breadth and depth of his vocabulary, rhythm and rhyme. Shakespeare will be dead.

But rather than anticipating that death with dread, perhaps we should find comfort in the words of one of Shakespeare's own characters, Julius Caesar:

"Cowards die many times before their deaths;

The valiant never taste of death but once.




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Published 20/11/2002
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