There’s a specific kind of fury we save for other people’s speech. Not their politics. Not their ethics. Their syntax. Their slang. The way they say “moist” or “literally,” or “no worries” instead of “you’re welcome.” Entire op-eds are written because someone used “impact” as a verb. Careers built on complaining about how kids don’t know the difference between “less” and “fewer.” You’d think language was a sacred heirloom we were all entrusted with – one vowel misstep away from total collapse.
But as Valerie Fridland reminds us, “language change is natural, built into the language system itself” (Like, Literally, Dude, p.2). It’s not a betrayal of English – it is English. Still, the resistance and opining are real. “Perhaps even more surprising,” she writes, “the more educated and financially well-off we are, the greater our linguistic rigidity… we think of ourselves as serving as some kind of role model,” which is how we end up sounding like the grammar police of a language already out on parole (p.1).
We know this rigidity. We’ve lived it. I remember standing on the pool deck after coaching swim practice, when one of the teenage lifeguards, maybe 16, complimented me on my jeans – then added, brightly, “Your body is tea.” I smiled, laughed, said thank you. I had no idea what she meant. I had to Google it later, alone, scrolling through Reddit and Urban Dictionary entries to decode a phrase that sounded like a physics experiment or a compliment gone wrong. (Turns out ‘tea’ in that usage is related to ‘the tea,’ aka the truth – so your body is truth.)
Language does this. It moves. It shapeshifts. And if you don’t move with it, you’re left politely nodding at a compliment you don’t understand. “Language,” Fridland writes, “is both function and fashion” (p.25). It has a job to do – and a vibe to maintain.
The impulse to correct or mock what sounds “wrong” to us is almost always about more than language. It’s about status. It’s about stability. It’s about the slow horror of realizing that the linguistic rules you internalized – the ones that helped you pass as smart or credible or employable – are being rewritten in real time by a girl in Crocs with neon eyeliner who calls your outfit “slay.” It’s not that you think she’s wrong. It’s that you’re no longer fluent.
Rudi Keller calls this the “invisible hand” of language change – a cumulative, unplanned evolution that happens through use, not design. “By using our language a million times a day,” he writes, “we change it continuously… most changes go unnoticed. We find some of them irritating or unpleasant, but in general, we cannot prevent a particular change, nor can we produce it on purpose” (On Language Change, p.13). Meaning: it’s not personal. And it’s not optional.
So when people rail against vocal fry or TikTok grammar, they’re not defending language. They’re defending a version of reality in which their own voice was the benchmark. And that version is dissolving. Prestige doesn’t age well in a living language. As Fridland puts it, “Linguistic features have no inherent status qualities… what gets picked up and spreads is really more of a measure of what gains traction in our group” (p.38). Language doesn’t owe you deference. It owes you nothing at all.
It is – to borrow from meme culture – giving evolution.
The Actuation Problem
If language is always changing, why doesn’t it change all the time? Why do some forms catch fire while others fizzle? Why does “on fleek” die while “based” survives? Why do some vowel shifts or pronoun swaps or new discourse markers burrow deep into the system – while others remain ephemeral, awkward, or just plain cringe?
This is what linguists call the actuation problem: “Why languages change in particular time and places and for some speakers but not others” (Like, Literally, Dude, p.40). It’s one thing to know that change is inevitable. It’s another to explain when the match is struck, who lights it, and why it catches.
Fridland calls it a “secret recipe” – a messy fusion of deep structural forces (like how our mouths want to make sounds more efficient) with intensely social triggers: “imperialism, urbanization, migration, ecological shift, social upheaval, and maybe even the sway of a social influencer or two” (p.34). It’s not just that language changes – it’s that it changes under pressure, through friction, across fault lines.
That means the people doing the changing are often those at the margins: young people, working-class communities, women, queer folk, speakers of minoritized dialects. As Fridland writes, “It is the people on the edges of the social space, not those in the center, who drive what language is to become” (p.40). If prestige preserves the past, precarity invents the future.
Sometimes that future looks like teenagers in New York City playing with phonetic rhythm until an accent becomes iconic. Sometimes it looks like Black English / AAVE birthing phrases – “on god,” “no cap,” “say less” – that go mainstream through memes, then get flattened in corporate ad copy. Sometimes it’s as subtle as dropping a consonant cluster to make a word easier to say – like “tol” for “told” – a change that emerges not because it was planned, but because it just felt better in the mouth (p.35). We notice the shift after it’s already happening. And by the time it hits a thinkpiece, it’s already old.
Language doesn’t change because someone decides it should. It changes because the conditions change. Because the system gets stretched or stressed – and someone, somewhere, improvises. “There are always underlying cognitive and articulatory forces,” Fridland reminds us – the way “our brains work and how our mouths operate” – that shape how we speak when social pressure opens a window for that shape to take hold (p.34). Language doesn’t wait for permission. It finds a crack, and it grows.
This is why attempts to predict what will “stick” – in slang, in grammar, even in marketing – so often miss the mark. Linguistic actuation isn’t a strategy. It’s an emergent property. It’s “vernacular reorganization,” as Fridland puts it – a peer-to-peer remix system, powered by play, desire, and difference (p.55-56). And it’s exactly what makes language such a volatile mirror of the moment.
If you want to see change in action, don’t look at the official rules. Look at the places where form is strained. Where power is in flux. Where identity feels slippery, or social scripts no longer fit. That’s where the actuation problem becomes the actuation answer. Where the center no longer holds – and something new, unsanctioned, and utterly alive takes root.
The Prestige Loop: How Language Repeats Us Back to Ourselves
By now, you probably know where I stand on prestige speech. (Spoiler: it’s a scam). I’ve written before about how prestige isn’t earned by clarity or care – it’s distributed unevenly through systems that reward proximity to power, whiteness, class privilege, and institutional validation. But here’s the thing that keeps tugging at me: if we know prestige is arbitrary, why do we keep performing it?
Why do we flinch when someone says “ain’t,” but nod along when someone overuses “discourse”? Why do we gently correct kids’ grammar at the dinner table – even when we admire their confidence? Why do I still hesitate before typing an “!” in an email, even though I maintain that it’s my favorite punctuation mark?
Because prestige, like most forms of power, is sticky. Once a form has been labelled as “correct,” it becomes magnetic. We repeat it not because it’s better, but because we’ve seen it work – it gets nodded at in meetings, accepted in grant proposals, retweeted with gravitas. As Keller argues, prestige forms survive not by merit, but by uptake: “Good linguistic memes are those whose use contributes to the success I want to achieve in my communicative actions” (On Language Change, p.148).
Prestige loops us. We imitate the language of those who are treated as credible – and in doing so, we reinforce their credibility. Keller calls this a spiral of selection: “linguistic selection – social selection – diagnosis – linguistic selection – etc” (p.152). Our speech is shaped by the social rewards we imagine are attached to it. And often, those imagined rewards are just repetitions of older scripts.
This is why even parody can reinforce prestige. When we mock the TED Talk cadence, or the “LinkedIn bro” voice – “I’m thrilled to announce…” – we’re not stepping outside the system. We’re acknowledging it. Participating in it. The same way that code-switching doesn’t just expose social boundaries – it confirms them.
David Crystal helps us see how deep this loop runs. Standard English, he reminds us, wasn’t born of reason or elegance. It was born of compromise. It emerged slowly, through what he called “levelling” – a convergence of written forms among professional scribes in fifteenth-century London (The Stories of English, p.247). “The common impression that such consistency exists,” Crystal writes, “derives from the fact that most of the written English we see around us is formal in character.” (p.7) Prestige was never about linguistic superiority. It was about institutional legibility.
And once you see that, the logic of prestige starts to feel less like a ladder and more like a hall of mirrors. You think you’re refining your voice – but often, you’re just rehearsing what’s already been rewarded.
Even the critiques of prestige (including this one!) are part of the loop. We’re all trying to be heard. And for better or worse, that often means using the tools of the house we’d like to dismantle.
The (Not So) Silent Majority: Who Moves Language Forward
If prestige loops us, discomfort propels us. Language doesn’t shift from the center; it shifts from the margins. And often, from the mouths of those who aren’t supposed to speak that way.
Valerie Fridland puts it plainly: “It is the people on the edges of the social space, not those in the center, who drive what language is to become” (Like, Literally, Dude, p.40). It’s not the professors or the pundits – it’s the kids on the bus, the girl in the group chat, the neighborhood kid at the potluck who says something so new you have to laugh before you understand it.
These moments aren’t fringe. They’re formative. And they illustrate a core truth: language doesn’t evolve through institutional channels. It diffuses. Unruly, unregulated, and often unrecognized – until suddenly, it’s everywhere.
David Crystal reminds us that variation – not uniformity – is the historical norm: “Middle English may have been a stylistic age; but it was above all a dialect age” (The Stories of English, p.194). Regionalisms and vernacular quirks weren’t deviant. They were standard before the standard. It was only when a particular dialect – the one used by London’s scribes and printers – was codified into a fixed form that other ways of speaking became “nonstandard” (p.338). Or worse: substandard.
What Fridland calls the complaint tradition – our cultural ritual of whining about the decline of English (also: what Deborah Cameron calls verbal hygiene) – didn’t take hold until the sixteenth century. Before that, nobody expected the language to sit still. But once standardization becomes a social project, it also became a political one: a means of policing the boundaries of class, gender, and race through syntax and diction.
Which is why it matters that language change so often comes from the mouths least expected to shape it. Young women, in particular, are unsung architects of English as we know it. Fridland notes that “when a community shows evidence of a shift toward a speech feature that appears to bring with it higher social prestige, women are most often the ones leading the charge” (p.59). Not because they’re trying to “speak properly” – but because they’ve always had to calibrate more carefully, punished more harshly for linguistic missteps, rewarded more reliably for getting it “right.”
And then there’s the playground — that petri dish of vernacular experimentation. Here, as Fridland puts it, kids engage in “vernacular reorganization,” shaping their dialects from the input of peers (p.55–56). Schools, sports, and social media create pressure cookers of linguistic innovation — “the pool of options we draw from when crafting our identities,” as she writes (p.55). We don’t always know what’s brewing there until it bubbles up: a new modal, a vowel shift, a catchphrase with staying power.
Rudi Keller gives us the scaffolding for this phenomenon. In his invisible-hand model, language change is cumulative, spontaneous, and never centrally controlled. “By using our language a million times a day,” he writes, “we change it continuously. Or… we produce a permanent change in our language. As a rule, we do not intend to do so” (On Language Change, p.13). The changes of tomorrow, he argues, are “the consequences of our acts of communication today” (p.14). And many of those acts aren’t happening in journals or newsrooms — they’re happening in whispers, stumbles, jokes, and TikToks.
So when a new form emerges — “gonna,” “sus,” “no cap,” or “your body is tea” — it’s not a breakdown of English. It’s the language doing what it’s always done: adapting to its users, not the other way around.
The question isn’t whether the margins will keep changing English. The question is how long it will take the center to catch up — and whether it will pretend, again, that it invented the change it simply inherited.
Why the Illusion of Control Persists
If we know language is always changing — if we live that change in our mouths, inboxes, and autocorrect fails — why do we keep pretending otherwise? Why do we hold so tightly to the fantasy that there’s one “right” way to speak, and that it’s somehow being lost?
The short answer: control. The longer one? Control dressed up as order, elegance, and good manners.
Crystal captures this historical shift with characteristic clarity: “Notions of purity, corruption, elegance, decorum, correctness… These ideas didn’t always exist. They arose as Latin became the imagined model of perfect language — and English, by comparison, was seen as chaotic, provincial, and vulgar” (The Stories of English, p.228). From this anxiety bloomed a centuries-long tradition of treating standard English like a fine porcelain teacup — delicate, decorous, and not to be mishandled by the uncultured.
But as Keller reminds us, that desire to tame language is a losing battle: “The eighteenth-century prescriptivists had two impossible aims: they wanted to stop the language changing, and they wanted to eliminate usage variation. In neither case were they successful. They could not have been, for it is in the nature of language to change and to vary” (On Language Change, p.474).
Still, the project continues. In part, because it makes people feel powerful — or at least not powerless — in a world that shifts faster than they can process. Holding onto a fixed set of “rules” is comforting. It’s a hedge against decline, a fantasy of stasis in a culture of churn. Complaints about split infinitives or the “decline” of vocabulary aren’t really about grammar. They’re a displaced lament: for generational change, for perceived loss of status, for the fact that young people talk differently and don’t ask for permission.
Crystal explains that “people who readily complain about language always have an unreal perception of what they do themselves: they routinely break the principle they most ardently command” (The Stories of English, p.186). This is perhaps the most delicious irony of all — that linguistic gatekeeping is often hypocritical at its core. The same executive who bemoans the word literally being used figuratively will throw around phrases like pivot, leverage, and circle back with wild abandon, never noticing how jargon mutates beneath his own tongue.
And yet, we rarely frame these shifts — or contradictions — as part of the natural life of language. We prefer to position them as threats. As Crystal writes: “To have only one style at our disposal… is disempowering and socially disturbing. Not only are we no longer in control of the situation in which we find ourselves, we soon discover that stylistic ineptitude is the first step on the road towards social exclusion” (p.10). But that insight cuts both ways: insisting on only one “correct” form of English is itself a kind of exclusion — a form of linguistic austerity masquerading as good taste.
Keller, again, offers a useful counter-model. Change, he says, is not top-down or planned. It’s a phenomenon of “the third kind” — arising “without a plan or the intention to create it, through the natural behavior patterns of humans” (On Language Change, p.154). What masquerades as control is usually just coincidence solidified by repetition, preference mistaken for permanence.
So the question isn’t really whether language can be controlled. It can’t. The question is why we keep pretending it can — and who benefits from maintaining that illusion. Often, it’s the people who already hold cultural capital: those whose way of speaking has been institutionally blessed, whose dialects have been written into the style guide, whose errors are rebranded as idiosyncrasies while others’ innovations are cast as mistakes.
And when you zoom out — from the boardroom to the schoolroom, from Oxford English to TikTok English — the pattern becomes impossible to ignore. What gets upheld as standard isn’t what’s most expressive, most efficient, or even most widely used. It’s what reinforces the existing hierarchy.
Which means: the rules aren’t rules. They’re rituals. And language change isn’t decay. It’s disobedience with a good memory.
Meme, Mouth, Market: How Language Morphs in Public
If language change has always been a collective act — spontaneous, cumulative, unplanned — then social media is its accelerant. It’s not just that platforms like TikTok and Twitter (fine, X) amplify new phrases. It’s that they collapse time, geography, and gatekeeping so completely that we can now watch language mutate in real time. A meme isn’t just an image; it’s a linguistic unit on the move. A catchphrase becomes a dialect, a typo becomes an ideology.
This is, to borrow from Rudi Keller, how the “invisible hand” of linguistic evolution now operates at internet speed. As he puts it, “The changes of tomorrow are the consequences of our acts of communication today” (On Language Change, p.14). When a phrase like “girl dinner” or “it’s giving” jumps from niche to norm, it doesn’t do so because someone at the top decided it should. It does so because a million micro-decisions — to repost, to remix, to reply with a knowing “same” — cumulatively nudge the language in a new direction.
These are Keller’s “linguistic memes” in action: bits of cultural material passed from one mind to the next, not because they’re correct, but because they’re sticky. And their stickiness isn’t neutral — it’s deeply tied to social success. “Good linguistic memes are those whose use contributes to the success I want to achieve in my communicative actions” (p.148). That success might mean sounding funny, cool, in-the-know, or, in the case of Twitter power users, being “chronically online” enough to win the internet for the day.
But what happens when those mutations become legible to the mainstream — when corporations and institutions catch wind of what’s trending and try to codify it?
Enter the feedback loop: brands “drop” Gen Z lingo to feel relevant, universities start teaching courses on emoji, your uncle posts a meme with the caption “vibe check” and everyone dies a little inside. Language that once emerged organically from subcultures or youth scenes is plucked up, flattened, and often misunderstood. What started as vernacular becomes commodity. Or worse: cringe.
David Crystal saw this coming. “Fashionable usage particularly affects the written language,” he writes. “In recent times, emailing and text-messaging are two illustrations of the speed with which a new orthographic style can emerge and become widespread” (The Stories of English, p.263). But that’s just one layer. What we’re watching now isn’t just orthographic. It’s structural, cultural, viral. Grammar is being bent to match tone and tempo. Syntax is reorganized for irony. Sarcasm and sincerity often exist in the same sentence — or in the same emoji.
And despite the pearl-clutching of traditionalists, this isn’t degradation. It’s adaptation. In a world of rapid-fire communication, where tone is often inferred not heard, new forms emerge to carry new functions. Lowercase affectation, extra periods, intentionally misused punctuation — they’re not random. They’re semiotic. Just like “um” and “uh,” they do real rhetorical work. As Valerie Fridland explains, hesitation markers “are uttered right before sudden increases in syntactic or semantic complexity or when encountering uncertainty or unfamiliarity during a speaking turn” (Like, Literally, Dude, p.75). Even our pauses are packed with meaning.
This is where Keller’s theory shines again: “Language is conceived as a ‘custom of influence’ which emerges ‘invisible-handedly’… through the natural behavior patterns of humans” (On Language Change, p.154). Influence, here, is not just personal. It’s infrastructural. What starts as a one-off turn of phrase can ripple through millions of users and become the new linguistic normal — not because it’s correct, but because it’s contagious.
So while linguistic change has always been happening, it’s now happening in a petri dish the size of the internet. That doesn’t make it less valid — it just makes it harder to gatekeep. And that, perhaps, is what unsettles the standard-bearers most. Not just that change is happening, but that it’s no longer asking for permission.
So What Now?: What Unintended Change Means for Power and Belonging
If language change is inevitable, spontaneous, and collective — if it’s something we do rather than something we control — then our cultural obsession with linguistic policing starts to look less like protection and more like projection. What we call “correctness” is often just preference in a lab coat. What we dismiss as “bad English” is usually English doing what it’s always done: adapt, remix, evolve.
And yet, the stakes remain high. Language is never just language — it’s a proxy for who belongs, who’s understood, and who gets to shape the terms of conversation. Valerie Fridland writes, “Our linguistic likes and dislikes are spurred, instead, by our social needs and wants. Speech is deeply entwined with our sense of self, and with the way we feel about each other, which is why the nuances of language affect us all in deeply subconscious ways” (Like, Literally, Dude, p.24). We’re not arguing about grammar; we’re arguing about status, identity, and power.
This is what makes the so-called “complaint tradition” so potent. The same forces that bemoan the loss of proper English often position themselves as cultural gatekeepers — upholding standards that were never neutral to begin with. As David Crystal reminds us, the notion of a singular “Standard English” is itself a historical artifact, forged in the fires of printing, empire, and prescriptivism: “Notions of purity, corruption, elegance, decorum, correctness… [were] deeply shaped by the influence of Latin and a desire for conformity among the cultural elite” (The Stories of English, p.228).
But here’s the thing: the future of English doesn’t live in elite consensus anymore. It lives in memes. In diaspora WhatsApp threads. In the rhythm of vernaculars passed down matrilineally, reshaped on the playground, and revived on TikTok. In the fluid grammar of drag slang, AAVE, queer code-switching, and the endless innovation of youth dialect. It lives in the places where language is elastic enough to hold contradiction, where meaning gets built — not handed down.
This doesn’t mean there’s no room for clarity, intentionality, or beauty in language. But it does mean we should let go of the fantasy that language ever stood still. As Rudi Keller writes, “Language change is a special case of sociocultural change” — and like all culture, it emerges “without a plan or the intention to create it, through the natural behavior patterns of humans” (On Language Change, p.154). There is no grand architect. Just us. Talking, texting, trying things out. Saying “your body is tea” without knowing if the other person will get it — and sometimes not knowing exactly what we mean ourselves.
So if we accept that change is the rule, not the exception, the more interesting question becomes: how do we respond to it?
Do we clutch our pearls and lament the loss of linguistic “purity”? Do we treat new forms as a threat, or an invitation? Can we make peace with the fact that we’re not in control — that even the “rules” we teach in schools are porous, partial, and historically contingent?
Or, perhaps more radically: can we learn to love the mess?
Because in the end, language is not a museum. It’s a marketplace, a dance floor, a shared experiment in being understood. And sometimes, to be truly heard, we have to be willing to sound a little different than we did before.