"The rise of the split infinitive is just one example of language phenomena which some commentators might not like, but which are becoming a normal part of everyday speech.

Dr Dembry, who helped set up the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 project with experts from the University of Lancaster, added: "Language teaching should reflect these changes, which can only be observed in a corpus such as this."

One change highlighted by the research is the habit of starting a sentence with the word "like".

The study found that the frequency of this usage of the word soared from 160 per million sentences in the 1990s to 625 per million in the 2010s.

Researchers found that since the 1990s, general use of the word "so" had doubled from 1,222 per million words in the 1990s to 2,367 per million.

Robbie Love, a PhD student from Lancaster University who worked on the project, said there was evidence of the word increasingly being planted in front of sentences.

Explaining the phenomenon, he said: "Generally speaking over time the more that words are used the more they become weakened and more ingrained. They lose value, and become weaker and more common."