Is the English language being "dumbed down", and if so, why?

[Oak Hills]

No, it is not being "dumbed down". The common people have always used less formal speech. Our society just recognizes them more, so the speech in media is more informal, whereas in the old days, the common people in many cases couldn't or barely could read and write.  It's not about the language becoming more informal; it's about the people we see writing things down. From what I've heard, many people thought it was scandalous when The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published and it was written using everyday speech; now that is extremely common in literature.  It is time we stop complaining about this sort of thing and admit that people have always talked like that; actually, it's possible that with higher levels of education in the general population, that the average person's everyday speech is less "dumbed down" than it used to be.