Is the English Language Changing?

[Mark]

short answer: all languages change over time. Some more rapidly than others.

None of the English dialects around today existed in 17th century England. They have all changed with time.

This is linguistic evolution -- well documented and unavoidable, until that line of languages/dialects goes extinct.

2000 years ago, people were speaking Anglo-Saxon in England -- a language much closer to modern German. 3 genders for nouns, different kinds of you, different sounds, different vocabulary. Every generation since then could easily understand the generation before and after it. But now, 2000 years later, we can't understand Anglo-Saxon without studying it as a foreign language. (Note that the Anglo-Saxon word for its language was ENGLISC.)

It is likely, that many of today's dialects will continue to accumulate changes over the next several centuries, eventually resulting in at least a few new languages, unintelligible from each other or from any English dialect around today.