THE ACTOR RALPH Feinnes believes that social networking sites such as Twitter are contributing to what he sees as the dumbing down of the English language.

The English thespian, whose full name is Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, has said that modern language “is being eroded” and blamed “a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter,” according to The Telegraph.

He was speaking at the British Film Institute’s London Film Festival where he received a Fellowship, presented to him by Irish actor Liam Neeson.

Fiennes directorial debut – Shakespeare’s Coriolanus – is being premiered at the London Film Festival.

“[Language] is being eroded – it’s changing,” he is reported to have said in the Evening Standard.

“Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us.”

The Herald Sun reports him as saying that students at drama schools were also suffering because of social networking websites.

He said he had been hearing from drama schools that the “younger intake find the density of a Shakespeare text a challenge in a way that, perhaps, [students] a few generations ago maybe wouldn’t have.”