The evolution of Englishes

de Sarah Buschfeld, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber, Alexander Kautzsch

By facilitating the contact between smaller groups of people living in widely separated places, the new media stimulate the use of minority languages, including constructed and historical languages. This article looks at the international community of users of Old English as a living language on the Internet. It analyses the linguistic competence behind the modest Anglo-Saxon revival and the strategies applied to deal with the modern world. As a sample of online texts, especially from Wikipedia, shows, not only does neo-Old English suffer from haphazard grammar and pervasive interference from Modern English, but it also depends too essentially on lexical innovation to have much of a future.