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Predicting the future of English

Considerations when engaging with the public

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2017

Sandra Jansen
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Extract

Predicting the future of English has been an exercise linguists have engaged with in academic settings for a long time, e.g. Sélincourt (1928), Jagger (1940), Quirk (1972) and Kortmann (2001). Mair (2013: 314) remarks that ‘in spite of the known risks involved in the task, there is no dearth of prophets in the linguistic community’. While he does not discuss the ‘known risks’ in his chapter, he does show that a lot of these predictions have not become true over the course of time.

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Research Article
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English Today , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 52 - 55
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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