“The language that the world is crying out to learn is diseased in its own country.”

English is but the third most commonly spoken language in the world, and yet so many people in foreign countries wish to learn it. The problem we face is that of people in other countries, where English isn’t their native language, ending up being able to speak the language better than those native to England. This old, sophisticated language is slowing deteriorating and for something significant to happen in the right direction we need to tackle the problem here in the UK.

Something that might motivate us to want to do something about it is this quote from the ‘Reith lecture 1996’- stating that “the standard of speech and pronunciation in England has declined so much… that one is almost ashamed to let foreigners hear it”. If they said that that back in 1996, I couldn’t bare to imagine the sate we’re in now. People have become lazy and just don’t care any more. Now if you try to correct someone’s grammar they say ‘they don’t care’ or call you the ‘grammar police’. They get annoyed- and they’re the ones in the wrong. My point: that something isn’t right if the ones trying to do something about this crisis are just getting it back in their faces.

A recent survey taken- asking people about their opinions on speech and grammar and its importance- brought back results of 74% of people saying that it doesn’t matter to them either way- if people spoke with proper grammar or not. Some even said that it wasn’t up to them how other people spoke, they said that “it’s a free country, just let people speak how they want to”. In questions designed to catch people out grammatically, the majority of people who gave similar responses to the one above responded with grammatically incorrect answers- maybe the ‘people’ they were speaking about were in fact themselves? The 26% that did say