Language changes over time, as people move from place to place and affect the dialect in their area. The changes can be slow or they can be fast.
For example, if a word is on-trend or has gone viral thanks to social media, it can very quickly find itself in the social lexicon and Oxford English Dictionary.
However, others take longer to be introduced or fade out of circulation, so long that it takes generations for them to fall off the tongues. According to a recent study, around 10 words could be at risk of dying out in Britain.
Research conducted by SAS Northern Europe has found that once-popular words such as ‘scran’, ‘grand’, and ‘parky’ have fallen dramatically in usage.
Comparing their usage between 1919 and 2019, they found that ‘scran’ had seen a 96 percent fall in usage while ‘grand’ had faired better with a mere 68 percent fall.
Other words faired worse than ‘grand’, with ‘ansum’ and ‘parky’ seeing a 98 percent and 84 percent fall in how often they were used respectively.
Meanwhile, ‘thoile’ and ‘belve’ saw a 95 and 82 percent drop in popularity over the 100-year period as ‘sing small’ and ‘bostin’ witnessed 68 percent and 60 percent drops too.
The final two verbal victims of language transformation are ‘liggle’ and ‘cob’.
‘Liggle’ has seen a 75 percent drop and ‘cob’ a 55 percent fall in usage.
While some words have seen a dramatic fall in how often they’re used, others have experienced a revival. ‘Titchy’, ‘ey up’, ‘gammy’, ‘drookit’, ‘lowance’, ‘cwtch’, ‘bonkers’, and ‘dreckly’ have all seen how often they’re used rise by over 2,000 percent.
The Mail reported that the biggest rise was seen by ‘gammy’ with a 15,968 percent rise over a single century. The only word below the 2,000 marker was ‘noggin’.
The researchers reached their astonishing conclusion after looking at 100 common regional terms and analysed their usage by using a Google Books search tool.
Head of Data Science at SAS explained that the changes in our language will continue to happen over the next few years and that popular culture has been a factor in the recent language changes.
Dr Brown said: “As dialect is continuously changing the diversity and richness of our language, the quirks, idioms and phrases often associated with certain communities will continue to change over the next few years.
“Rapper Dizzee Rascal’s song ‘Bonkers’ being number one in the charts contributed to a huge 6,000 percent increase in usage in the last 100 years.”
