The following chapter is translated from The Encyclopaediac History of the Classical Languages written in the early 22nd century.
To tackle the problem, the English department in a progressive ex-colonial university appointed a dashing young head, Prof. Utilitix to try and uplift the somewhat poor image of the department. Immediately upon joining, he reviewed the curriculum and found that the subjects included: (a) The origins of the novel (b) 18th century poetry (c) A couple of courses on Shakespeare (d) Linguistics (e) Critical theory and so on. He looked at each of these subjects and asked the question: ``What is the use of this subject?'' but got no satisfactory answer.
He was appalled. ``This curriculum is an anachronism, a relic of the colonial Raj.'' he said, ``Today the British are not our masters any more! On the other hand English is the most universally used language the world over. The curriculum of an English department should be designed with this modern usage in view.''
He analysed the system methodically and came up with the following conclusions:
Things went well for about 10 years and Prof. Utilitix became the hero for his pragmatic foresight. Then, around 2010, new pressures started building on these `New English' departments, the most common one being the pressure for new subjects.
Teachers wanted a course on setting question papers. Employees wanted a course on how to fill income tax forms. Businessmen wanted a course on how to talk to foreign clients; in one place, an influential businessman even got two courses instituted: (a) British-style business talk and (b) American-style business talk. And the younger generation wanted a course on the syntax and semantics of Rap. Naturally all these myriad demands could not be satisfied everywhere and so the different departments started diverging.
There were a few members of the older generation who complained that with the cessation of Shakespeare and Shaw, English standards were falling fast, but their voices were drowned in the crowd. Progressive intellectuals turned round to remind these old-fogeys that the immense diversity of demand was a sign of healthy progress and that the archaisms of Shakespeare and the witticisms of Shaw must give way to the beauties of Mills and Boon, the glories of Rap and the intricacies of IT forms. `` ``The old order changeth yielding place to new,'' said a long dead guy,'' they said. ``Archie and M\&B suffice our literary needs.'' There was no question of returning to a primitive past.
However M&B and Archie could not hold together for 2 decades what the classical canon had nourished for 3 centuries. There were suddenly too many contenders for the literary certificate---Barbara Cartland, Louis L'Amour, Ludlum, Chase and many more. Prof. Utilitix campaigned hard against this trend, asserting that literary merit should be judged on the objective grounds of statistics alone and not on some unfounded whims. However by now he had lost his commanding position. Nobody heeded him.
Within a short period of 20 years these different departments had diverged so much that they were teaching different languages. It was not the style that differed vastly. Rather the grammar and spellings of the erstwhile English were in complete disarray. A couple of specialist departments even vied with each other for evolving new scripts. After all, each new script generated a PhD and learned exegesis on them generated some more.
By the 2030s this Babel-state of English became a fashionable problem. PhDs addressing this were written in droves. Like other PhDs they catapulted the authors up the academic ladder and like other PhDs, they served as food for silver-fish in dusty libraries. After all how could the pupils unite what their gurus had divided, especially when the vested interests of all parties lay in maximising doctorates rather than minimising divisions?
Seeing the failure of the academics, an ISO-standard committee was set up to define a unified English but instead of breaking the Babel it only created an extra official storey in it. Finally in desperation, concerned activists organised forums but by then they could not understand each other because each spoke in his own dialect of Pigish (Pigish for pidgin English).
At the same time as English was evolving into Pigish, the English departments in the universities were disintegrating. The various demands ranging from Rap to IT-form expertise were high but these demands were splitting the departments whilst new diploma-giving institutes were mushrooming outside the universities.
And old Prof. Utilitix was the hero no more. It was one of those bizarre ironies of fate that when his department was officially renamed from ``Dept. of English'' to ``Dept. of Pigish'' he was terminated for not keeping up with the times. He was of no use any more.
For a while, people continued to prefer university degrees to the diplomas. But by 2040 this started dwindling when they began to find that apart from the hubris associated with a university degree, the diplomas were better. They finally had to close down when the employers found out---that the diplomas were more useful than the degrees.
... ...
English died a little after the university departments. For about 20 years, a few sporadic experiments at multi-Pigish continued ... By 2080, almost all the Pigish speaking world had returned to their vernaculars ...
What for the linguist is fascinating is how similar yet different is the story of Latin and Sanskrit from that of English. When Latin died the Romance languages took birth. With the decline of Sanskrit, the Prakrits were born. But the pigish miscarriage of English killed both mother and child.