Christopher: Everything you've ever been taught about 'proper' grammar is probably wrong. The double negatives, the 'ain'ts', the 'sloppy' speech your English teacher circled in red? That's not language decaying. That's language evolving. Lucas: Whoa, that's a bold start. You're telling me my high school English teacher was wrong this whole time? I feel like I need to go back and get my grades changed. Christopher: Well, maybe not for the essays, but for how you think about language itself? Absolutely. And today, we're exploring why. This whole idea comes from a fantastic book we're diving into today: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter. Lucas: Right, and McWhorter is such a unique voice. He's a linguistics professor at Columbia, but he's famous for making this super complex stuff feel incredibly accessible and fun. He's not your typical stuffy academic. The book is highly rated, and you can see why—he writes with this infectious energy. Christopher: Exactly. And his expertise in creole languages—these new languages born from intense contact—gives him a really unique perspective on how language is built from the ground up. That's going to be central to our chat today, because it gets to the heart of what language is. It's not a set of rules in a textbook; it's a living, breathing thing. Lucas: A living thing that's constantly making 'mistakes' to survive. I like that. So where do we start? How does this evolution actually happen?

Christopher: We start with the simple, almost invisible changes that happen every day. McWhorter argues that what we perceive as laziness or error is often just the language taking a path of least resistance. It's a process called sound change. Take a word like 'impossible'. Lucas: Okay, impossible. Christopher: In Latin, it was originally 'in-possibilis'. But saying 'n' right before a 'p' is a little awkward. Your lips have to do two different things back-to-back. Over time, speakers naturally started to smooth it out. The 'n' sound slowly morphed into an 'm' sound, because 'm' and 'p' are made in the same place in the mouth. 'In-possible' just became 'impossible' because it was easier to say. Lucas: Huh. So it wasn't a rule change, it was just... collective laziness? Christopher: You could call it that, or you could call it efficiency! It’s a process called assimilation, and it happens constantly. But the changes get even more dramatic when we look at the meaning of words. This is called semantic drift. Lucas: That makes sense. I feel like I see that happening in real-time. The word 'awesome' used to mean something that inspired genuine awe, like seeing the Grand Canyon. Now my nephew uses it to describe his scrambled eggs. Christopher: That's a perfect modern example from the book! The punch of the word gets diluted over time. But McWhorter gives an even more stunning historical example: the word 'silly'. Lucas: Silly. Okay, foolish, not serious. Christopher: Today, yes. But trace it back. In Old English, 'silly'—or sælig—meant 'blessed' or 'pious'. It was a high compliment. Lucas: Wait, what? Blessed? How on earth do you get from 'blessed' to 'foolish'? Christopher: It's a slow drift. From 'blessed', it came to mean 'innocent' or 'harmless', like a blessed soul. Then, 'innocent' drifted to mean 'deserving of compassion' or 'pitiable'. Think of Shakespeare, where a line about 'silly women' doesn't mean they're dumb, it means they are vulnerable and deserving of protection. Lucas: Wow, that completely changes the meaning of those old texts. Christopher: It does. And from 'pitiable' or 'weak', it was a short jump to 'simple' or 'ignorant', and finally to our modern meaning of 'foolish'. In just a few centuries, the word did a complete 180. It shows that language isn't a fixed code. It's a river, and the words are just stones being smoothed and reshaped as they tumble along. Lucas: That's a great analogy. So the language we're speaking now is just a snapshot of this ever-flowing river. The 'rules' are just describing where the water is at this exact moment. Christopher: Precisely. And that river can sometimes branch off and create something entirely new.

Lucas: Okay, so language is always changing. But what happens when it has to start over completely? That's where McWhorter's work on creoles gets really mind-blowing, right? This is his specialty. Christopher: This is where the story gets truly incredible. It's one thing for a language to evolve, but it's another for one to be born out of thin air. This happens through a two-step process. First, you get a 'pidgin'. Lucas: I’ve heard that term. It’s like a simplified, broken version of a language, right? Christopher: Exactly. Imagine groups of people who don't share a language are forced together—on a trading post, or tragically, on a plantation. They need to communicate, but they don't have time to learn each other's full languages. So they create a pidgin: a stripped-down, emergency tool with a few hundred words and almost no grammar. It’s like a linguistic hammer and nails. You can build a shack, but not a house. Lucas: So how do you get a house? Christopher: That's the miracle. The 'house' gets built by the next generation. When the children of these pidgin speakers are born, that pidgin is the main language they hear around them. But for a child's brain, a pidgin isn't enough. Their brains are hardwired for complex grammar. So, spontaneously, they take the broken pieces of the pidgin and build a real, full-fledged language. That new language is called a 'creole'. Lucas: Hold on. The kids just... invented grammar? Out of thin air? Christopher: They did. It's one of the most powerful pieces of evidence we have that language is a human instinct. McWhorter tells the amazing story of Hawaiian Creole English. In the late 1800s, plantations in Hawaii brought in workers from China, Japan, Portugal, the Philippines—all speaking different languages. They developed a pidgin English to communicate. A Japanese worker might say something like, "Me go work," and a Portuguese foreman would understand. Very basic. Lucas: Right, just the essentials. Christopher: But then their children were born. Those kids heard this pidgin all around them, and their brains went to work. They started adding grammatical complexity that wasn't in the pidgin. They created consistent rules for tense, for plurals, for questions. For example, they started using 'wen' before a verb to mark the past tense, as in 'He wen go,' meaning 'He went.' Nobody taught them that rule. They created it. Lucas: That is absolutely wild. So how is that different from just mixing languages, like Spanglish? Christopher: That's the key distinction. Spanglish is a mix of two full languages, Spanish and English. The speakers are bilingual. A creole is born when the input is not a full language. The input is a pidgin, which has no real grammar. The children add the grammar. They create a new system from scratch. It's why McWhorter calls creoles "the world's only truly new languages." They don't just evolve from a single parent; they are born from the ashes of linguistic necessity. Christopher: This power of language to create itself is incredible. But it also has a dark side. For every new creole born, hundreds of old languages are dying. And McWhorter is very clear: when they're gone, they're gone forever.

Lucas: That’s a sobering thought. It’s easy to get excited about language creation, but what about its destruction? The book talks about language death, and the numbers are pretty shocking. Christopher: They are. Some estimates suggest that 90 percent of the world's 6,000 languages will be extinct or on the brink by the end of this century. That’s a language dying roughly every two weeks. Lucas: And when a language dies, it's not like a species that leaves fossils behind. It just... vanishes. Christopher: It vanishes completely. And with it, a unique way of seeing the world disappears. McWhorter describes what happens to a language as it's dying. It doesn't just fade away; it simplifies and breaks down. He gives the heartbreaking example of the Cayuga language, an Iroquoian language from New York. Lucas: What happened to it? Christopher: As younger generations stopped learning it fluently, the language started shedding its complexity. Cayuga used to have very specific words for things. For example, it had distinct words for 'thigh,' 'ankle,' and 'cheek.' The last speakers started just using the word for 'leg' or 'face' for everything. The intricate system of prefixes and suffixes that made the grammar so rich was abandoned in favor of simple, separate words, often borrowed from English. Lucas: So it became a kind of pidgin version of itself? Christopher: Exactly. McWhorter says the last speakers spoke Cayuga with "the soul of English." They were using Cayuga words but arranging them according to English grammar. The original, unique structure was lost. It became a ghost of a language before it disappeared entirely. Lucas: That's genuinely heartbreaking. It's like a whole way of seeing the world just evaporates. So can't we just... revive them? I mean, people always bring up the example of Hebrew. Christopher: That's the question everyone asks, and McWhorter addresses it directly. The revival of Hebrew was a perfect storm, a truly unique event in history. You had a group of people migrating to a new land, all speaking different languages, with a powerful religious and national motivation to unite under a single tongue. And crucially, they had extensive written records of Hebrew—it was never truly 'dead,' just not spoken colloquially. Lucas: So it’s not a model that can be easily replicated. Christopher: Almost impossible to replicate. Most dying languages are spoken by small, often displaced communities. They have incredibly complex grammars that are totally alien to speakers of dominant languages like English. McWhorter gives the example of Mohawk, another Iroquoian language, where a single, long, complex word can be a whole sentence in English. Teaching that to a generation that grew up with English is an immense challenge. Lucas: So for most of these languages, the prognosis isn't good. Christopher: For many, the best we can do is what linguists are racing to do right now: document them. Create dictionaries, record speakers, and analyze the grammar so that the unique worldview encoded in that language isn't lost to humanity forever, even if it can no longer be spoken.

Lucas: So, looking at this whole lifecycle... it seems like language isn't something we control at all. It's this wild, organic force that builds itself up, changes constantly, and sometimes, tragically, just withers away. Christopher: Exactly. I think McWhorter's ultimate point is that language is like a coral reef—constantly growing, changing, and sometimes dying. It's not a static cathedral built by grammarians. The 'rules' we learn in school are just a snapshot of a river in constant motion. Lucas: A river that's fed by our 'mistakes,' that can carve out a whole new path when it needs to, and that can, eventually, run dry. Christopher: That's the perfect summary. And understanding that helps us appreciate the messy, beautiful diversity of human expression, from the newest creole being born today to the oldest, most complex language about to be lost. It frees us from the anxiety of 'proper' English and allows us to see the genius in all forms of human speech. Lucas: It really makes you think differently about your own way of speaking, doesn't it? What 'mistakes' do you make that might be the future of the language? Christopher: A great question to ponder. We'd love to hear your thoughts. What linguistic 'rules' have you always found strange or secretly broken? Let us know. Find us online and join the conversation. Christopher: This is Aibrary, signing off.