Are there any theories as to what the English language (written and spoken) may be like in the future, (say in a hundred years or so?) How about similar possible future changes in other languages besides English?
The invention of the printing press slowed down the rate of change of written language a lot, so there’s a theory that the invention of multimedia recordings will have a similar effect on the rate of change of spoken language. Time will tell.
I heard in an undergraduate linguistics course at UCSC that languages typically evolve through social innovation. In the class, the professor said that typically women speak a language closer to how it will be spoken, and children learn language more from their mothers. Typically, he said, men are more conservative in their use of the language – not so much on the cusp. I have no idea whether what this guy said was supported by credible research.
I think English may experience further simplification, such as the elimination of irregular past participles. People will say “have went”, “have came”, “have ran”, and so on. The use of Britishisms on the Internet, by misguided Americans who want to look sophisticated, may well lead to American and British English becoming more similar, and some Americanisms may be lost.
I think German will stay much the same, but may see further use of the dative case for those few prepositions that now govern the genitive. These usages are already typical in everyday speech.
Radio, film, and television have already an enourmous braking effect.
Everything will be initialisms and acronyms.
“As Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.”
I kinda doubt it – from what I’ve heard, it’s British English that has moved closer to American English in the post-War years. (Already, for example, Brits generally understand American accents much more easily than Americans understand British accents, at least in my experience.) I think the number of Americans using British expressions in order to sound sophisticated will always be a pretty minor thing – not enough to swing the language of the masses in that direction.
I think the subjunctive might be scheduled to disappear in the not-so-distant future. Using the term “they” as a neutral singular pronoun rather than the awkward “he/she” is already widespread, and will probably gain wider acceptance. Regional accents will continue to disappear with the ever-increasing reach of mass communication.
“Alright” and “alnight” will become commonly accepted. ::shudder::
Really? As in “alnight diner”? I’ve never seen that.
The use of third person plural pronouns as third person singular pronouns of unspecified or indeterminate gender will be formally accepted. An English teacher might object, but they will be wrong.
Shall will continue to be used as it is today in those dialects and cunstructions which do so.
Same for whom.
Question: Will the use of the objective case continue to expand? If so, how? What causes this? Is it me?
Somewhat related, but IIRC it comes from the Attic Greek that plurals of neuter nouns (of Greek and Latin origin) take a singular verb q.v. data, agenda (although that’s a gerund).
Huh?
It’s quite understandable that Latin plurals would be reanalyzed as singular collective nouns in English, given that they have no overt plural morphology that English speakers recognize. Hell, the same happened, in a way, with some second declension Latin neuters in the Romance languages. For instance, OVUM, ‘egg’, plural OVA, was reanalyzed by speakers of Romance (a.k.a. Late Vulgar Latin) as two separate words. The final -M being lost with subsequent alteration to the final vowels, the Romance forms would have been OVO and OVA in the singular and plural respectively. Well, those were reanalyzed as two separate words - one understood as a masculine singular referring to a single egg - Italian uovo, Spanish huevo - and the other was understood as a feminine singular describing eggs collectively: i.e. roe or caviar - Italian uova, Spanish hueva.
Reanalysis of plural forms as collective singulars is a quite natural and normal process, and one can expect that “data” will go that route in English just as OVA did in the Romance languages. I’m not sure what Attic Greek has to do with any of this.
you must have been away with the faeries when you posted that…or maybe you’re just barking mad. if you ask me, these so-called sophisticated britishisms make you sound queer as a nine-bob note and are about as useful as a wet fart in a thunderstorm.
I gotta wonder whether spoken language will simply drift further from the written form so that we have, essentially, two languages. That’s already true, of course, for many speakers of English today. But will it be true for all but a very few of the educated elite?
I don’t know much… but I do know I hate it when someone says “axe” instead of “ask”… Sigh.
Noooo! That one was mine. (They do it on Futurama, so it’s destined to happen.)
I doubt it. I think if anything reading and writing are becoming and will continue to become more critical for the average person, not less. Which means I think the written language will be modified to accommodate how people actually speak. I don’t know about spelling reforms, since we English speakers really seem to hate the idea (even though it’s not all that uncommon in many other language communities) but I suspect that many of the more formal constructions we tend to use in writing will eventually fade away, as they have done from the spoken language, since it seems like we have less and less use nowadays for a formal writing or speaking style.
Bad news. We’ve been talking about this in another thread lately . . . short explanation is that “axe” is actually probably just as old as “ask”; Chaucer, for instance, used the two interchangeably. It’s only a historical accident that we’ve decided one is preferred and the other is stigmatized; but since “axe” has survived since at least the middle ages, I don’t see it going away any time soon.
“Y’all” will become standard form, eventually drifting into usage for both singular and plural second person. To compensate, Southerners will say, “Y’alluns” to refer to the second-person plural, and will be widely mocked for this construction by grammarians who insist that only “y’all” may be used for second-person singular or plural.
Daniel