On social media, I saw a friend share an article by Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein titled Saved by the Norton . The article bluntly states that the English major has severely declined in the United States, citing data that in 1970, 1 out of every 13 U.S. bachelor’s graduates majored in English; today, fewer than 1 in 60 do. The situation in China is similarly grim. This year, multiple provinces released lists of undergraduate majors under warning, with English and law tied for the most frequently flagged majors. The MyCOS employment blue book shows that English majors’ starting salaries and job relevance are both below the national average. In recent years, admission scores have been falling, and English has become a “relegation pool” for many institutions.
The UK is no different. The marginalization of pure language and literature departments is old news; even The Guardian has published editorials lamenting the successive closures of English literature departments. Chinese language and literature, at least, is kept on life support by civil service recruitment, but to say it hasn’t been deeply affected would be self-deception.
This is not a problem confined to one country—it is a global phenomenon. Young people everywhere seem to have lost interest in language majors.
However, this does not mean language itself has depreciated. On the contrary, language has never been more valuable—but its form of power has undergone a fundamental shift.
The Swallows of Yesteryear
Looking globally, decades ago, “the ability to organize words” was still a scarce form of social power. In the days before the internet and cheap reproduction, a book, a government notice, or an editorial depended on expensive media and scarce distribution channels. Whoever controlled the organization of words controlled the interpretation of social order. A scholar who could craft elegant memorials to the throne, or a translator who could precisely decipher foreign intelligence, was an indispensable “holder of discursive power.”
Take me—I’m a post-80s generation. In my student days, I experienced many “relics” of the old era: finding a distant, stranger “pen pal” through a literary magazine and exchanging letters; cutting out and pasting into a scrapbook a series of works by the same author in a magazine; or, during class, daydreaming while repeatedly copying a modern poem by some local young “poet”—all of which were, in essence, forms of “worship of textual ability.”
The internet profoundly transformed human communication, giving everyone a microphone. Now, AI gives everyone the ability to instantly generate structurally sound prose. When something that once required a decade of practice—organizing words—can now yield a 70- or 80-point result with a flick of the finger, the ability to organize words degrades from “power” to “basic skill.” This year, when I wrote “Tech Blogs May Have Reached Their End ”, I discussed the same thing: AI is hollowing out the value of “standard-answer” textual work. Programmers writing tutorials, translators doing translation, clerks drafting press releases—they are all experiencing the same power transfer.
The market’s yardstick for words is no longer rhetoric and logic; instead, it has been replaced by traffic and partisanship. When a long article goes out, readers quickly slap labels on it—whitewashing, marketing account, old pedant—and the speed of labeling far outstrips the speed of reading comprehension. Last month, a crypto billionaire posted a long article in response to rumors about an old relationship, which was widely dissected online. Almost no one believed his explanation, but even his critics had to admit his writing was indeed strong.
Nowadays, textual ability and personal credibility are completely separated in public discourse. Dong Yuhui’s knowledge-driven带货, Wang Hailin’s criticism of the film industry’s ills, Liu Zhenyun’s satirical novels—once they enter the public sphere, they are quickly taken over by labels of stance and persona, and are rarely treated as “words” in themselves. The authority of language no longer comes primarily from the text, but as an extension of the person.
Nonsense Literature
If “words becoming a sieve” is a problem on the consumption side, then on the supply side, AI brings another layer of trouble: the sheer volume of language that ordinary people can access is expanding at an unprecedented rate.
In the past, I used to collect all kinds of bestselling e-books online, hoard a large number of humanities and social science books in my cloud drives, and even use Calibre software to build what I called a personal “digital library” on my NAS—essentially using “compulsive hoarding” to cope with knowledge anxiety. And I barely read any of those books. The knowledge and words inside them, unless I opened them, had no intersection with me.
But AI and algorithms are different. Before them, a person only needs to show any subconscious action or linguistic tendency, and they will continuously supply infinite bytes. On short-video platforms, once you click on a cute pet video, your feed is filled with cats and dogs forever; if you comment on a movie, the algorithm assumes you’re interested in all similar films. This feeding mechanism is precise and efficient, like an automated conveyor belt in a farm.
The same happens in the textual realm. When you scroll to a post titled “Life Advice: Never Have Deep Friendships with These Three Types of People,” click through and finish reading, swipe away, the next one will be “Truly Capable People Usually Have These Three Traits.” Same structure, similar keywords. It feels like you’ve absorbed something while reading, but after finishing, you recall nothing.
The more insidious harm is that this homogenized content is quietly reshaping our linguistic intuition. If a person is fed daily by algorithms with “mindset,” “cognition,” and “emotional value,” what they write will unconsciously grow the same plasticky texture. By the time they really want to express something, they find their mind is full of others’ chewed-up phrases—disposable, with no aftertaste.
So we return to the earlier question: in an era where linguistic power has sunk to everyone’s hands, where AI writes summaries for you, polishes your prose, and even mimics your tone to reply to messages, how much effort is a person still worth investing in words?
Linguistic Innovation
Yet, in this global descent of linguistic power, Chinese seems to have one extra card up its sleeve compared to English.
For example, I’ve recently often recalled a line from a song: “The candle flame awake at midnight cannot bear to blame me.” Not a single word plagiarizes the ancients, yet every word feels like a living character fished out of the semantic field of Chinese culture. Seeing “candle flame,” the image naturally emerges—flickering light, dripping wax; seeing “cannot bear,” a personified tender morality instantly floods in. But English is different. Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” to the average American today is roughly like a Chinese reader opening the Book of Documents. Even if someone imitates Emily Dickinson and writes “Because I could not turn from Time — He gently paused for me,” given the average contemporary American’s knowledge, it would be hard for them to see the depth behind it.
Interestingly, though, this moat doesn’t work in most scenarios. Open any government work report, or watch any domestic news broadcast, and you’ll find the same set of vocabulary on repeat. The former almost invariably uses “realize,” “advance,” “implement,” “strengthen” in every paragraph, while the latter favors “emphasize,” “point out,” “demand,” “must”—squeezing complex realities into standardized phrases that are both safe and all too familiar. Occasionally, a local government report quotes a line like “Late spring days show mountains and rivers fair, with fragrant breeze and blooming flowers,” which can evoke a sense of “a general’s brush opening a new face.”
But thinking about it the other way, this also exposes its true utility: when everyone speaks with the same vocabulary bank, a phrase that strays slightly from the mainstream can capture countless hearts. For example, “The sky is blue waiting for rain, and I am waiting for you.” Before Fang Wenshan wrote that, I doubt any AI could have produced it. After all, this kind of linguistic innovation truly worth savoring always comes from a specific person, touched by something in a specific context, and then fixed with the most unassuming words—a genuine feeling that operates on an entirely different dimension from AI’s probabilistic predictions.
Unfortunately, a Chinese literature student spends four years memorizing periodizations of literary history and verifying the pronunciation of a certain character in the Tang dynasty, yet never learns how to use words to move others or to reshape the world with AI. An English major pores over Victorian novels but is never encouraged to capture real moments in their own life in English. If such skills are replaced by AI, there’s really no reason to complain.
Whether English or Chinese majors, their decline is not because language has become unimportant. On the contrary, language has never been so important. What is truly declining is that educational model that treats memorizing literary history as a core skill and polishing rhetoric as a survival skill. After linguistic power has sunk to everyone’s hands, what is truly scarce is no longer the ability to “write something,” but the weight of what is written—something worthy of being believed by others.