This post makes another detour from my original topic. Roughly a month ago, after I wrote my last post about romanticism and the place of translation technology in university curricula, I was in for another surprise – which eventually connects to the same train of thought.

Within a week, I saw two articles that lamented about the deterioration or even the eventual death of the English language. I’m not a native speaker of English, nor am I a specialist of its history, and I don’t know how often such articles are published – but I definitely wasn’t used to seeing such pieces about English coming from high-profile news sources. That said, I am always ready to admit that this is due to my ignorance about the history and the current goings-on of English.

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