Friday 22 January 2021

brexit and the english language

Here's an interesting piece which looks at how the most traumatic event for years has effected the way the British use their language:

How Brexit changed the English language

The UK's departure from the EU not only introduced new phrases, but showed how language can be used to shape political debate. ANDREAS BUERKI reports.

A number of expressions have entered everyday use since Brexit started. Terms like 'Article 50', 'no deal', 'hard border' may now seem just part of life but they were seldom, if ever, used before Brexit.

New and interesting phraseological patterns have also arisen around some of these words. For example, treaty articles didn’t used to get 'triggered'. Instead, they were 'invoked'. But we now take as obvious that Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union is 'triggered'.

In linguistic terms, this is known as a 'collocation' – the idea that words are commonly used together. So, just as in English (but not in some other languages) one brushes one’s teeth rather than cleans them, one now 'triggers' Article 50 in stead of 'invoking' it. These patterns show that language is a system of conventional habits of expression more than a system governed by strict, logical rules. After all, there is no strict rule that says you can’t use the word 'activate' or 'invoke' before 'Article 50', and yet hardly anyone says that.

These new patterns have entered the grammar of English and need to be part of speakers’ linguistic knowledge if they wish to discuss Brexit (although some of these patterns might well fall into disuse once we talk about Brexit less). This shows that language can change very fast if required, despite the fact that the traditional view of language change is that grammatical patterns take hundreds of years to change.

Language is also often far from neutral. ...

How language became a Brexit battleground | The New European

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