The impoverishment of the English Language

By Aman Abdullah Shahid -

Language is a unique human instrument. A means of sentient and emotional expression. Language is how we regulate ourselves, how we order ourselves. It is what distinguishes us. 

It is a cognitive and social system that allows humans to encode thoughts, communicate abstract ideas, and transmit culture. A mark of our civilisation. 

Despite centuries of study, linguists, neuroscientists, and psychologists agree that many aspects of language remain not fully explained: how children acquire it so effortlessly, or how we can create infinite ideas from finite rules. It is not dissimilar to consciousness itself. It is partially understood as a system of rules and brain mechanisms – we can identify the brain regions responsible for speech, map the neural networks that process meaning, and study the evolution of communication - but its full mystery - its elegance, its generative power, its capacity to express thought, moral insight, and imagination - is still beyond complete scientific explanation.

An isolated human experience in the form we understand it.

And language, like any instrument, dulls when neglected. English is no exception. The English Language has been the medium through which nations have defined courage, liberty, and law, it now stumbles under the weight of its own convenience. Where words once bore consequence, they are now subject to merely fill space. Thus the tragedy of modern English is not that it has diminished in capacity, but that we have grown indifferent to its proper use.

To understand what has been lost, we might begin with three moments when English reached its highest register - when it served not mere communication, but command, console, and binding.

“I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.

At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty's Government - every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation.

The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

In those few lines, Winston Churchill marshalled the English language as one might marshal an army - disciplined, resolute, and majestic. Each clause advances with deliberate cadence; each repetition strengthens resolve. His words are arranged with care, purpose, and moral weight. English, at its height, was capable of carrying a nation’s fear, courage, and destiny in a single breath.

There is a reason these words endure. It is not simply what was spoken, but the way in which they are spoken. The repetition is deliberate, the rhythm is steady and the progression is unmistakable. The language advances with precision as each clause reinforces the last through its structure. 

Churchill did not treat English as a casual instrument. He understood that language, when properly handled, does more than communicate intent; it can shape resolve. This was English used at full capacity - neither embellished, nor theatrical, and yet confident in its own weight.

What is striking, listening now, is not that such language sounds old-fashioned, but that it sounds almost alien. It is not as if we lack the understanding, but because we rarely hear English spoken with such care, patience, and seriousness of purpose. The words assume attention. They expect the listener to follow. They do not apologise for complexity, nor do they substitute meaning for ease.

That confidence once characterised public English more broadly. Political speech, legal writing, civic documents, and education all assumed a shared respect for language. Words mattered because consequences followed. 

To understand what has been lost, it is worth placing alongside Churchill another moment when the English Language carried the full weight of its moral inheritance.

The Gettysburg Address (1863)

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate - we cannot consecrate - we cannot hallow - this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

If Churchill’s English was martial, Lincoln’s was ascetic. There is no excess in his speech. Not a single wasted word. His language is solemn and does not feel heavy. Each sentence builds on the last, through a moral logic. Lincoln speaks as though words themselves impose the obligation. To say something publicly is to bind oneself to it.

Notice the confidence of Lincoln’s restraint. The speech is short because it does not confuse length with importance. It trusts that meaning, clearly stated, will endure without amplification. And it has… Lincoln’s iconic Gettysburg address is one of the most well remembered mobilisation’s of the English Language to full effect. 

To speak was to accept responsibility. Today, in contrast, language often escapes accountability. Words are uttered, posted, and forgotten. The binding contract between speech and meaning - once considered inseparable - has simply fractured in the modern age.

That sense of responsibility once characterised the great civic texts of the modern world. English, over time, became the language in which collective human commitments were articulated. Eventually, spreading beyond the Anglosphere and into the international realm also. 

Let us have a look then, at the United Nations charter;

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…
to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights…
to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained…

Here English performs its highest civic function: to articulate universal principle. The clauses move with solemn care, balancing aspiration with precision. This is not casual language. It is careful, it is layered, it is deliberate. Each clause performs its function adeptly. Each phrase is weighed and one can sense the burden of mankind expressed in a few sentences. 

The authors of the Charter understood that ambiguity in language could become violence in reality. A single misplaced word might change the meaning of law, or the reach of justice. English, here, is not a vernacular convenience; it is a moral framework by which nations agree to hold themselves accountable.

English here is doing something extraordinary. It is attempting to bind humanity to itself. To articulate shared values across cultures, religions, histories, and grievances. To take the chaos of the twentieth century and subject it to order through words.

One might say it is the English Language undoing Babel.

The United Nations Charter, like the Gettysburg Address, assumes that language can carry moral weight. That words, once agreed upon, can restrain violence, define justice, and create standards beyond power alone. International law lives or dies by precision. A single word can determine responsibility, guilt, or legitimacy.

That English became the primary language of this system is no small thing.

It is the language of treaties, arbitration, and diplomacy. It is the language in which war crimes are prosecuted and peace settlements ratified. When states dispute borders, when ceasefires are negotiated, when obligations are recorded for history, it is English that most often carries the burden.

This should command respect.

And yet, while English governs the world abroad, it is treated with astonishing carelessness at home.

The language capable of sustaining international law is reduced, in daily use, to approximation. Vocabulary shrinks. Expression flattens. Words are chosen for convenience rather than accuracy. Thought is gestured at rather than expressed.

I am not stating a matter of accent or class. English has always belonged to everyone. Nor is it a complaint about slang, which has always had its place. The issue is not about informality, but indifference.

Compare this to our contemporary speech. People no longer choose words; they default to them. Sentences trail off unfinished. Everything becomes “something like that”. The English Language has been diluted into convenience. Syntax dissolves; vocabulary contracts. We substitute gesture for articulation - “sort of”, “kind of”, “like”, “you know”. Precision is treated as mental effort not worth its weight and treated as unnecessary effort. And eloquence, once a civic duty, is confused as pretension.

The danger here is not about aesthetics. It is about intellectual thought and the elegance of expression. 

Language shapes thought. When language becomes vague, thought follows. When a society loses the habit of careful speech, it loses the habit of careful thought. Debate inevitably collapses into noise. Disagreement hardens because it can no longer be articulated in its proper form.

Education has reinforced this drift. Literacy is now functional and lacks expression. Students are taught to extract information, not to command language. Writing becomes a task, not a craft. Style is treated with suspicion, as though clarity and beauty were distractions rather than disciplines.

Technology has accelerated the problem. In the age of information… speed is rewarded and brevity is mistaken for insight. Communication becomes constant and equally lacks depth of commitment fostering a sense of indecisiveness.

And yet, the English language remains vast and alive. Within it still sleeps the cadence of Churchill, the lucidity of Lincoln, the moral exactitude of the United Nations Charter. The tragedy is not that English has lost its power; it is that its speakers no longer ask enough of it.

The vault is still full.
What is in doubt is whether we still know how to open it.

Please find below some quotes that I believe extract the wealth of the English Language:

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

Jahwarlal Nehru – a tryst with Destiny 

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again. A nation is not governed which is perpetually to be conquered.

My next objection is its uncertainty. Terror is not always the effect of force; and an armament is not a victory. If you do not succeed, you are without resource; for, conciliation failing, force remains; but force failing, no further hope of reconciliation is left.

Power, and authority, and distinction, are rarely abused by the weak; nor can they be abused by those who are restrained by law. But a fear of a military government is not the fear of a single despot; it is the apprehension of a whole body of armed men, acting under no known law, and guided by no fixed principle.

The question with me is, not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy.

Edmund Burke - Conciliation with the Colonies 1775

The tyranny of imperialism struts abroad, covering its face in the masks of democracy, nationalism, communism, fascism, and heaven knows what else besides. Under these masks, in every corner of the earth, the spirit of freedom and the dignity of man are being trampled underfoot in a way of which not even the darkest period of human history presents a parallel. The so-called statesmen to whom government had entrusted leadership have proved demons of bloodshed, tyranny, and oppression. The rulers whose duty it was to protect higher humanity, to prevent man’s oppression of man and to elevate the moral and intellectual level of mankind, have in their hunger for dominion and imperial possessions, shed the blood of millions and reduced millions to servitude simply in order to pander to the greed and avarice of their own particular groups. After subjugating and establishing their dominion over weaker peoples, they have robbed them of their possessions, of their religions, their morals, of their cultural traditions and their literatures. Then they sowed divisions among them that they should shed one another’s blood and go to sleep under the opiate of serfdom so that the leech of imperialism might go on sucking their blood without interruption.

Muhammad Alama Iqbal – All India Radio Address 1938

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Shakespeare – Hamlet Act II Scene II

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Thomas Jefferson – Declaration of independence 1776

It is not in the power of an individual, or even a party, to overturn a constitution which has stood the trial of ages; but it is in their power to weaken it by slow degrees, to sap the foundations by a series of small and almost imperceptible encroachments, and to render the whole fabric insecure by corruption and neglect. The language of our laws, the principles of our government, the spirit of the constitution, all demand our constant vigilance, and our attention to every act which may diminish the public confidence in the regular administration of power.

Edmund Burke – The cause of the present discontent

The worth of a man is in proportion to the objects he pursues, and to the amount of individuality which he is permitted to develop. Society can only progress when individuals are free to seek truth, experiment with ideas, and express themselves without fear. To constrain this liberty is to stunt both the moral and intellectual growth of a community; to permit it, is to cultivate not only talent and knowledge but also the character of each member of the community.

John Stuart Mill – On Liberty

Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship... We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities; in history, as in science and politics, relativity rules, and all formulas should be suspect. ‘History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules; history is baroque.

Will Durant – The lessons of History

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens – A tale of two cities