English is the most popular international language currently spoken, and has been this way for quite a while. In this manner, it is quite similar to Latin - it is used for scientific, religious, and academic communications. It is the "default" language to use abroad and is the reason my website is written in English. However, English is popular not because it is a great language that won its place in a fair and democratic competition among other languages - rather, it is that popular because the British Empire has been a major influence with its many vast colonies. And even after the British Empire ceased to exist and gave up its colonies, its largest ex-colony USA has been one of the strongest political and cultural forces by itself. Quite a few linguistic developments in English are tied to the history of USA, primarily the history of its society. USA was also the country where Internet and computing as of we know today was largely created, which is why most OS's default language is English.
One of the reasons why English is so unique is that after the colonies have become independent, the language lost its uniformity and a single central correct standard on the matter of linguistics. No more was the English crown an authority over deciding the language factors. While pronuncation is the first thing that comes to our minds and differs even between state to state in USA, there are quite a few other things that are different between the English as used in other countries. While the British and American English is rather famous, Australian English could become a future addition to the "English family". Quite a few writing differences could be noticed between British and American English - for example saviour, savior; metre, meter; as well as a few punctuation differences. The lack of central authority means that language development is driven not so much by academics and scientists, but much more so by media influences and common folk. Some people may say that this is an advantage, but I am of a belief that in other languages, the development is driven by the people first, and only later documented by academics as new words and correct spellings - academics see what would do good for the language, and what would break its structural integrity, or ease of use.
In no other language have we observed a removal of an integral personal pronoun such as we have observed in English. Driven by a self-percieved elite class of the English-speaking community, some of them have considered the pronoun thou (the singular version of you), to be too rude and personal, so they have stopped using it and popularized not using it, effectively making it be seen as low-status or undesirable. Now you may say that this was not that big of a change. I can still write my article just fine even without this pronoun. However, there are quite a few reasons for why this was a bad idea. Some readers may be familiar with a concept of Universal Grammar - that is, that the grammar is largely hard wired into our brains, which is why so many different languages are so similar - a truly alien language could completely omit personal pronouns and would be very hard, if not impossible, for a human to learn and English took a slight step in that direction.
You can think of an example where this pronoun would be especially useful - imagine a guy trying to hit on a random cashier and invite them to his house. Now, it used to be that he would have to make this decision - either he says "thou" and then this is even more rude and inappropriate from the first words uttered; or he says the formal "you", in which case it is immediately seen as a ridiculous and an incoherent suggestion, because the formality of "you" clashes very poorly with the boldness of the suggestion. This guy's dubious chances of "success" are lessened by having "thou" in a language. Whereas when you only have formal "you", it is much easier to blur lines as now the guy can invite the cashier without either being rude from the start, or sounding ridicilous and insincere on a deep linguistic level.
Nowadays, people complain about the lack of expression and grammatic options that the English pronoun system can offer. Yet these are largely the same people that have complained about "thou" a few hundred years ago. It is outrageous that people can remove a useful tool - this little personal pronoun - from a language, and then later complain about the lack of personal pronouns and varieties of expressions you can make. It really reminds me of TF2 - very long ago popular figures in the community have nerfed weapons like the Ambassador and the Sandman, which gave many classes long-range utility; and now the same class of people complains that the Sniper class doesn't have any counters! Obviously, there are still ways around him, just like there are still ways to sanely communicate in English, but it is very sad to see the removal of great options at expression that have once existed, but are now long gone. Now if you want to play the TRUE TF2, where these weapons are back in their prime, you can play on Castaway.tf, the greatest community server ever created. But if you want to speak English with thou, you'll have to move to still existing Quaker (no, they don't play Quake) settlements in deep rural USA.
English has very unique, dare I say exclusive rules on personal pronouns - as far as I know, this is the only language where if you say "he", you can only refer to a biological male and if you say "she", you can only refer to a biological female. In other languages, either grammatical gender is largely absent, or grammatical gender is not the actual underlying gender. In fact (and I will use Russian for this example, but this applies to French, Spanish, Latin, and many others), in quite a lot of languages, I can refer to a single person with any third person personal pronoun I want, depending on the situation. I can say that he is "он" (he), becuase he is a "человек" (human); I can say that she is "она" (she), because she is a "личность" (person); I can even call them "они" (they), because they are technically many cells and organs and chemicals working together to create what they are. You see, it is only in English that when I substitute a person pronoun for somebody's name that I am making a deep statement about their identity. In English, the grammatical gender is mostly absent, but for some reason, the real underlying gender is very much present.
To "fix" this, many people suggest inventing new personal "neopronouns". In fact, this has gotten so out of hand, that many social media platforms will ask you and you personally for your pronouns that you are ought to create yourself (or copy from somebody else). This shuts down many attempts at communication, which is sometimes what neopronouns are trying to cover. But other languages don't suffer from this issue because they have seperated the grammatical gender and the actual gender. Effectively, in some circles, it is considered offensive to say any 3rd person pronoun - I can't say he, she, or it; because then I am making a deep seated judgement about the person's identity. Which means that I can only say "they" (which was historically allowed in English), but then when I want to refer to multiple people, it is very confusing. Many of these fixes just further muddle and confuse a language that already suffers from pronoun problems. Which, again, makes you question whether "thou" removal was really neccessary and whether it could've made the pronoun landscape easier to navigate. Because a very similar thing is happening here. And worst of all - some linguists are going alongside this movement precisely because it is popular and as I said, linguists document changes and not make them. However, I believe that this change will worsen the language, and so linguists are ought to stand against it. But they really can't do much or enforce any solution even they could come up with because there is no single authority for the English language as I have said previously.
The Spanish language is a rising alternative to English and many scientific articles are now published in Spanish as it doesn't suffer from the same issues. Now some people insist on introducing "Latinx", however such a mechanism is not needed in Spanish where grammatical gender is not equated to the actual gender and people who suggest this have a serious misunderstanding of how Spanish grammar works. I believe that English is not going away any time soon, but if American and British will split or some similar disastrous event will occur, Spanish would be a great fallback option for the educated.
____________________________________________
| 1611 | 1750 |
|I we | I we |
|thou you | you you |
|he/she/it they | he/she/it they|
|--------------------------|-----------------|
| 1864-1970 | 2026 |
|I we | We w'all|
|you you | you y'all|
|ze/xe/etc/they they | ze/xe/ey/ th'all|
--------------------------- buns/.../ _-------
\_________/
In case you are not convinced or have expected something else, here are 2 cool links:
% This article gives an examination of English as an abomination of multiple European languages and shows its grammatical inconsistencies.