Reimagining English

The strength of the English language has long been its capacity to absorb whatever competing languages throw at it. This portmanteau of a tongue owes barbecue to Haitian, guru to Hindi, alcohol to Arabic, coffee to Turkish and Arabic, tea to Chinese and trousers to Irish Gaelic, not to mention its enormous early debt to Latin and the Germanic languages. In a hardscrabble world where the watchword is adapt or die, English has done very well at adapting.

In The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English, Montreal author Mark Abley both marvels at the directions in which the language is expanding and wonders whether the centre will hold. He dispenses early on with the battle between stern prescriptivists and easy-going descriptivists about whether English should resist change or throw the doors open to amendments from the pragmatic, the ingenious and the just plain careless. “Amid the commotion, rest assured: I have no ideological ax to grind.” In...