Cheerio pussy cat, hi there awesome English

It has been used in farewell since the beginning of the 20th century, but the word “cheerio” is dying out as the English language becomes more Americanised.

Over the past two decades the traditional word “marvellous” has been on the wane while the American “awesome” has gained ground as the most characteristic emotive word.

By listening to recorded conversations, researchers have been able to track how the digital revolution and America’s growing cultural influence have changed the way British people speak.

Words such as “pussycat”, “marmalade” and “fortnight” are also being used less frequently, according to the study by Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press.

Some of the changes mirror the way technology has evolved and society changed.

In the 1990s we were captivated by Walkmans and discussing the poll tax, whereas now we talk about smartphones, the internet and treadmills and company names such as Google and Facebook have become familiar.

Prof Tony McEnery, from the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University, said: “These very early findings suggest the things that are most important to British society are indeed reflected in the amount we talk about them. New technologies like Facebook have really captured our attention, to the extent that, if we’re not using it, we’re probably talking about it.

“The rise of 'awesome’ seems to provide evidence of American English’s influence on British speakers.”

These are only the initial findings from a small pilot of the project, named the Spoken British National Corpus 2014.

Prof McEnery said: “We need to gather hundreds, if not thousands, of conversations to create a spoken corpus so we can continue to analyse the way language has changed over the last 20 years.

“We are calling for people to send us MP3 files of their everyday, informal conversations in exchange for a small payment to help me and my team.”

Prof McEnery added that a project on this scale has not been carried out in Britain since the early 1990s. “That data, which is now out of date, is still used by researchers from around the world today, so we know there is a real appetite for research of this kind.

“It is of great importance to collect new recordings from the 2010s in order to understand the nature of British English speech as it is today,” he added.

Figures show that in 2014 the word “awesome” appears 72 times per million words compared with “marvellous”, which has fallen in use from 155 times per million 20 years ago to only two times per million today.

The researchers also found that while “cheerio” was used commonly as a parting phrase in the 1990s data it has yet to appear in conversations from this decade. The researchers said: “We expect elderly people to still use it but not youngsters.”

The study has also found that the word “fortnight” appeared to have declined between the 1990s and 2010s, while the phrase “two weeks” was used in its place — perhaps because “fortnight” was seen as too vague.

The use of the word “essentially” has risen dramatically and appears to have broadened in meaning to be used where you might expect the word “really”.

The rise of the “treadmill”, which did not appear in 1990s data, could be due to increased health awareness.

In decline:

Fortnight
Marvellous
Fetch
Walkman
Poll
Catalogue
Pussycat
Marmalade
Drawers
Cheerio

Talk of today:

Facebook
Internet
Website
Awesome
Email
Google
Smartphone
iPhone
Essentially
Treadmill