Saturday 5 April 2008

English Officially Declared a Foreign Language

(Oxford) A recent study carried out by English scholars at Oxford University in Oxford, England has concluded that ‘proper’ English is now a minority language and recommend it be taught alongside French, German and Spanish as a foreign language.

Researchers analyzed the content of over 12,000,000 internet forum postings from traditionally English speaking countries and found that after proper nouns were taken into account, less than 12% of them were composed entirely of words found in a dictionary.

The figures were even lower when sentence structure was taken into account. It is estimated that the incidence of grammatical correctness could be below 3%.

The final damning nail in the coffin was the discovery that only 0.02% or 1 in 5000 of the submissions made any sense at all. An effort to identify relevance was abandoned following a failure to obtain a statistically significant sample.

On the bright side, it was observed that a substantial proportion of the youth aged between 5 and 18 were able to communicate effectively in an completely new language composed only of acronyms and smileys.

As a result of this analysis, the Oxford English Dictionary will be archived for historical purposes and replaced with a new:

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Academics who had dedicated their careers to preserving the dying art of English were :-( . However, after a few commiserating beers at the local pub, they were found ROFL hysterically.


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