Many in America are concerned about the quality of English used today. A multitude of printed articles have been produced about the decline in American educational attainments, particularly with regard to reading and to quality writing.

The most important question facing English is whether it will dissolve into a collection of related but mutually incomprehensible sublanguages. In fact, it has been stated that British English and American English are moving apart to such an extent that within 200 years, they could be mutually unintelligible.

There are those who dispute this idea because people have been expecting English to fracture for some time. Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster both expected American English to evolve into a significantly different languaage from its British cousins.

H.L. Mencken had this idea of distinctly separate languages in his first edition of The American Language, although by the 1936 edition he had reversed this opinion, and he was suggesting, perhaps only half in jest, that British English was becoming an American dialect.

The suggestion that English will evolve into separate branches in the same way that Latin evolved into French, Spanish, and Italian seems to ignore the obvious consideration that communications have advanced drastically in the intervening period. Movies, television, books, magazines, music albums, business contacts, the Internet, e-mail, and tourism are all powerfully binding blending influences.

One language expert suggests that If we are to worry about anything to do with the future of English, we should consider not that the trends of the various language strands will drift apart, but that they are growing more and more indistinguishable. Based on current observable speaking and writing conditions, such a concern is not realistic in America alone; much less between the United States and Britain; as verified by the expansion of malapropisms heard and seen in print.

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