Is the decline of the vowel a sign that language is evolving?

Consonant-mad brands are everywhere and the more often vowels are dropped, the more people get used to it and make adjustments to rapidly understand implied meanings

Tech companies like Tumblr arrived on the scene in the 2000s, dropping the ‘e’ for distinctiveness and practical reasons (Reuters)

The first step in the next stage of language’s inevitable evolution – or devolution – may have already hppnd. It’s true that A, E, I, O and U have never been given much respect. In Scrabble, they’re each worth a measly point. But vowels, up until now, have not been actually without value. Their purpose has been clearly defined and accepted. When we announce we’re going to suss something out, for instance, they keep us from just hissing like a snake.

What we might call the Modern Vowel Massacre seems to have begun sometime in the early Noughties, when the band MGMT found some indie-rock fame. In 2009, in People magazine, the band informed us that the proper way to pronounce its name was to simply say the individual letters: M-G-M-T.

“The confusion may lie,” the magazine said, “in the fact that the band’s original name was The Management, which they shortened to MGMT after discovering that another artist had the rights to it.”

Around the same time, tech companies such as Tumblr and Flickr arrived on the scene, dropping the “e” both for distinctiveness and because the altered names made them easier to trademark, claim domain names on the internet and conduct other practical business.

Now it seems I can’t go a week without seeing a handful of consonant-mad brands, like MNDFL, a meditation studio with a branch in my Brooklyn neighbourhood; or WTHN, which offers “a brand-new acupuncture experience”; or Mdrn, a “vertically integrated real estate and lifestyle brand” whose very modernness, it seems, is suggested by its abbreviated logo.

Then there are the friends who sign their (ever-briefer) correspondence “Yrs” and the rampant contractions on Twitter, with its 280-character limit.

Vowels are the distinctive thing now. The lack of them is routine.

There was a time when you had to be an experimental weirdo to ditch vowels. In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce used the word “disemvowelled” in a section that includes this exchange of crystal-clear dialogue:

— Nnn ttt wrd?

— Dmn ttt thg.

Before we are all Joyce – God bless him – I would suggest that we take a deep breath, a mndfl one even, and consider the culling of our five (maybe six) friends. After all, there are words that can hardly do without them: muumuu, audio and oboe, just to queue up a few. One cannot text someone “b” and expect them to know one is referring to an oboe.

And what about that old Scrabble lifesaver “euoi”, a cry of impassioned rapture in ancient Bacchic revels? If you know of another way to identify a cry of impassioned rapture in ancient Bacchic revels, I’d like to hear it. Really. I’ll wait.

Panicked that we might be sliding (even more quickly) towards a fully emoticon-based pictographic language, I called the linguist, Columbia professor and prolific author John McWhorter to ease my mind. First, he assured me I wasn’t crazy to suggest an uptick in this trend.

“There is a fashion in American language culture right now to be playful in a way that is often childlike,” McWhorter says. “This business of leaving out the vowels and leaving you to wonder how to pronounce something, it channels this kid-ness in a way – like saying ‘because science’, or the way we’re using -y, when we say something like, ‘well, it got a little yell-y’.”

McWhorter acknowledges that the more often vowels are dropped, the more people get used to it and make adjustments to rapidly understand implied meanings. “You can imagine someone naming a band MGMT in 1976, and everyone would just be baffled,” he says. But he doesn’t see disemvowelling creeping into more formal areas, and expects the trend won’t move “beyond the realm of that which is ironic or iconic”.

One can hope. “Vowels,” the poet Rimbaud wrote, “Someday I’ll explain your burgeoning births.”

But how would we explain their deaths?

© New York Times