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The official rule is you should use shall any time you are talking in first person (I or we), otherwise you should use will. In modern language, shall is going the way of the dodo.
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Modern AMERICAN language, to be specific.
Other things that are going away:
most of the relative pronouns
This is the man whom you stole it from?
This is the man that you stole it from?
This is the car which you were talking about?
This is the car that you were talking about?
This is the place where we ate?
This is the place that we ate at?
Adverbs:
Let me do this real quick. (I myself am a frequent abouser of that one)
Some uses of to: (it's becoming a word form instead)
I gotta go.
Whom:
The vast majority of the time, people forget to use this instead of who when they're referring to a person that is operating as a grammatical object rather than a subject.
However. we have some things that stubbornly refuse to die.
Such as:
the medieval spelling system: knight....."gh" is a spelling structure for a sound that hasn't been in the English language since before Shakespeare.
We have 13 vowels in the English language. For these thirteen vowels we have 5 symbols (unless you include y, in which case we have 6). The consonants are in a less serious position and I don't remember the skewed numbers off the top of my head, but still, sheesh when are we going to sit down and fix our alphabet so that people don't have a mental hernia trying to figure out our spelling rules and all the exceptions.
Also, we still have that bloody useless c that French fopped onto us. It doesn't do anything you can't do with a k or an s. The only thing close is when you put it together with a h to get the ch sound.
As to adding new stuff, one of English's greatest strengths is the vast number of synonyms and antonyms we have for different words. It allows a very impressive ability to shade meanings in our speech. And we are gathering new words everyday. If there's one thing English is good about, that is utilizing the languages of other cultures to change and build our own. (probably comes from being on a little rock in the middle of nowhere that got invaded six or seven times before the Normans finally took over)
Still, if I learned nothing else from my linguistics classes, it's that:
Shift happens.
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Hey, you got some flak for it, mate, but I liked the mini-lesson. Maybe I'm just crazy...
