Writers Abroad Magazine Issue 2 March 2015 | Page 33

WRITERS ABROAD MAGAZINE
Where does English go from here? What can we expect to emerge from the foaming,
fertile mud? No-one knows, of course. But my guess is that it will separate again into
distinct strands on the other side: not geographically, but culturally.
Each trade or field already has its own jargon and vocabulary — everyone realizes
this. But try gathering, for example, English-speaking astronomers from around the
globe into one Skype conference, and ignore the differences of accent. You’ll find that
they have similar sentence structures that transcend national boundaries completely.
Historians, engineers, philosophers, gamers: all of these have their own preferred
word-spacers, sentence structures, syntax forms, and of course vocabulary, quite
outside the specialized language tools needed for their subject. Renaissance Man is
already far behind us and specialization fields are so esoteric society would fall apart
if the whole machine did not pull together in one giant complex mass. It only makes
sense for this specialization to develop further into the language it has already made
inroads on.
So where is the creative writer’s place in all of this? How hard will it be in a few years
to use the right language to capture the imagination of such a diverse audience?
Perhaps the maxim will hold even truer than it used to: “Better to write for yourself and
have no public, than write for the public and have no self.” In a world with so many
interconnecting threads, where there’s a signal, there’s a way. WA

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