The British Library is hosting an exciting exhibition on the evolution of the English language from Anglo Saxon to modern day text speak, with everything in between. This is the first time there has ever been an exhibition like it, solely looking at the English language which is spoken by over a third of the population. Visitors will get to see where the language came from and where it is headed. See: www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish
Evolving English has iconic books and manuscripts alongside media and text to showing social, cultural and historical strands from which the language has been woven. You can find manuscripts from The Kind James Bible, Churchill speeches, Beowulf, Dr Johnson's dictionary, Gandhi, etc speeches. There will also be other types of media displaying the strands of the English language from adverts, web pages, to billboards and text messages.
I moved from a large town to a village when I was around nine years old. The village I moved to was a mining village, where everyone knew each other and was related to at least another ten people there. One thing that stood out most in my mind was the language they used. They seemed to have their own words for things. They used "I ken" for "I know", "My eine" for "My eye", or "Ma Die" for "My Grandpa" and some of the words were just slang like "sevin and elevin" instead of "seven and eleven". It took me a while to get my head around all these different words. My friends were asking "Whit ya havin for yir dinna?" I couldn't answer straight away, I had to think and then tell them, "What I was having for my dinner?" It's funny how moving only a distance of only eight miles and the language can be so different.
Text speak is one of the subjects covered at the exhibition. This is such a bit part of current life, pretty much everyone texts, from granny's to toddlers. The variation in language, I think pretty much depends on age. The older generation tend to still spell out words, the younger generation use text speak, which let's be honest is a language of its own. I have noticed a lot of the younger generation use text speak in everyday life, I'm not sure, that is the way forward. What do you think?
I think the best thing about the exhibition is that all the visitors can record their voice by reading Mr Tickle and have it added to the audio archive of the British Library. The idea is to record a snapshot of voices in 2010 for future analysis in the years to come. How cool is that?
There's a fun quiz which you can take at http://www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish/quiz.html to test your knowledge on the evolution of the English language. I am clearly no good at the knowledge of the English language, as I took the easy peasy one and only got 50%. How bad is that? Why don't you have a go and let me know how you get on.
Evolving English: One Language, Many Voicesopens on at the British Library from the 12 November 2010 until 3 April 2011. It is a free exhibition, which is great for everything they have to offer. It looks like a fantastic exhibition, well worth the visit.
If you want to tweet, you can tweet using #evolvingenglish (link the #tag to http://bit.ly/dmIoPm).
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