The future of
written English will owe more to Hollywood films than Dickens or Shakespeare,
if the findings of a study into children’s writing are anything to go by.
The analysis of 74,000 short stories found that their
written work was littered with Americanisms, exclamation marks and references
to celebrities.
Researchers who looked at the entries to a national
competition found they were increasingly using American words such as garbage,
trash can, sidewalk, candy, sneakers, soda, cranky and flashlight.
The stories, written by pupils aged seven to 13, show
how fairy cakes are referred to as cupcakes and a dinner jacket has become a
tuxedo.
‘Smart’ is now often used for ‘clever’ and ‘cranky’
for ‘irritable’.
Celebrity culture also has a powerful influence on
children’s work, with Simon Cowell and Argentinian footballer Lionel Messi
among the famous names cropping up repeatedly.
Children stumbled over simple spellings such as ‘does’
and ‘clothes’ and struggled to use the past tense correctly, often saying
‘rised’ instead of ‘rose’ or ‘thinked’ instead of ‘thought’.
Researchers also found that punctuation was underused,
especially semi-colons and speech marks. Some did not know how to use capital
letters.
However, exclamation marks were overused. Researchers
found 35,171 examples in total, with some young writers using five at a time.
The study of more than 31million words will be
compared with future research to see how written language evolves.
Popular US fiction such as the Twilight vampire novels
and films is thought to be fuelling the increasing use of American vocabulary
and spelling.
Modern technology was also influential. Out of almost
300 references to ‘blackberry’, nearly half referred to mobile phones.
Characters frequently ‘googled’ for information or
used ‘apps’.
But the researchers found a wealth of imaginative and
inventive ideas.
Fears that texting was corrupting children’s written
work were unfounded, they said, with youngsters only using text speak when they
were referring to a text message.
Samantha Armstrong, of the OUP children’s dictionaries
division, said: ‘Perhaps we are catching a glimpse of the language of the
future.’ Chris Evans, whose radio show runs the competition, said the results
were ‘fascinating’, adding: ‘Who’d have thought that Messi and Jeremy Clarkson
would be some of the most used celebrity names?’
