London - Did you eat marvellous marmalade a fortnight ago? Then you’re a couple of decades out of date.
That, at least, is the early conclusion of a vast research project examining how spoken language changes between generations.
By comparing examples of conversation from the early 1990s and today, researchers are looking at which words have fallen out of fashion – and which have become common.
One of the most dramatic changes is the decline of the word “marvellous”, which has fallen in use from 155 times per million words to only twice per million today.
It has been eclipsed by the word “awesome”, which now appears 72 times per million words – and is an example of the steady creep of Americanisms into British English.
“Marmalade” has dwindled from speech over the last 20 years, reflecting a change in breakfast habits, while “fortnight” has slipped possibly because it is too vague.
Unsurprisingly, technological advances have had a huge impact with words such as “Facebook”, “Google” and “internet” all taking greater prominence in our vocabulary, while “Walkman” has dropped out of favour.
The findings are from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 project, being compiled by Lancaster University’s Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) and Cambridge University Press.
Some 200 recordings of modern conversations have so far been analysed, but the team are appealing for thousands more to match the collection from the 1990s.
Tony McEnery, of CASS, said: “These early findings suggest the things that are most important to... society are indeed reflected in the amount we talk about them.” - Daily Mail