Is grammar becoming redundant?
The evolution of language
I have been in an international environment for a long time, meaning I have interacted with people from different cultures who speak different languages. Before I entered this international environment, I was in India, which is no stranger to the existence of multiple languages. Being multilingual and having a lot of multilingual friends, mixing languages is habitual. Even posts on my social media feed are mixtures of different languages. When one sentence is written in two different languages, it becomes difficult to get the grammar of both languages correct. You tend to adapt the grammar of one of them based on what seems appropriate. It brings me to think, what role does grammar really play and what role will it play in the future? Can those adaptations of grammar be labelled mistakes if the writer knew exactly what they were doing wrong? Those adaptations of grammar do not stop us from understanding what is being said. The reason we need grammar is for consensus, if there is no consensus different sentence structures would mean different things to different people leading to no clear communication. But where minor mistakes do not lead to ambiguity, there might be no need to correct grammar, since we all would understand what is being said, hence consensus.
The evolution of languages is natural, the way any language is spoken always changes with time. Take the transition of Shakespearean English to modern-day English as an example. “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” would today simply be “Why are you Romeo?” The difference in these two sentences is the reason why, for people today, Shakespeare is harder to read, at least initially. With the mixing of languages, however, such changes will take place quicker. If a certain population speaks two languages, their culture will affect both and both shall evolve. They remain separate languages and the same problem might be solved differently in both languages, but they shall influence each other’s evolution. The people that only speak one of these languages will pick up the changes, and these changes will become concretized. Take for example Indians who speak Hindi and English. Indian English bears a difference from English spoken in other parts of the world. This is because their culture influences it. Hindi on the other hand might be mixed with English (even if it is just one word), causing Hindi to alter. Anyone Indian that does not speak Hindi will still learn this Indian English. In the same way, an Indian that does not speak English will still learn mixed and developing Hindi, because of the people around them. Hindi and English continue to evolve separately but are influenced by a somewhat similar demographic.
The question is do we watch these languages evolve? Do we become a part of this evolution? Or do we consciously try to resist it by purely speaking one language at a time?