The Dink Network

English is evolving faster than any other language? I doubt it. There are just to many speakers for the language to evolve very fast. If the English language would evolve rapidly it would more likely spread out, leading to more variety. The chance of American English, British English, Australian English and all the forms of English I now ignore will evolve in the same direction is... Small. The English language doesn't have any official regulation, which makes evolving in one direction troublesome. And if it's just evolving in a lot of directions... Well than in the end any version of English is mostly correct, making it even easier.

And English hasn't really evolved a lot in the last 400 years. Just try reading some Shakespear, then read some early 17th century Dutch texts. You'd be surprised how similar the Shakespeare texts are to modern English.

I think small languages tend to evolve a lot faster...

English is very big though. But even though I'm certainly not a native speaker I only occasionally come across totally new words. So by far most words are only used in specific circumstances, in which case often other languages than English don't even have a proper substitute. (Since a lot in the engineering/sciences is done in English anyway...) I must admit that English does have a lot of synonyms though.

Oh, did I mention that my favorite English word is "defenestrate"?

Fun things...