Well, when are we? Sure, Modern English (not the band) is different than Middle English, but not as different as say Modern German and Modern English (both of which are Germanic languages). How come languages never branch off and form seperate and distinct languages anymore?
Good question…i’m sure there a few languages still not discovered…say like the Amazon…I know Keith Richard has a whole language onto himself
I’m as confused as a baby in a topless bar
I believe one of the reasons different languages exist was that a group of people would become isolated, and develop their own language, customs, etc. These days, with our advanced travel and communications, it’s pretty difficult to isolate a group of people for a long enough period to develop new a language. The trend is probably toward LESS languages. At the risk of starting a debate, I’d say that some day the whole world will be speaking English.
Soup is right. Historically, languages have been formed by descent from a common stock, followed by geographic isolation. Dutch is descended from old Low German, Deutsh is modern High German. Etc.
New languages will be created from common stocks, but they won’t be defined by geographic isolation. They’ll be defined by other kinds of isolation and specialization. Chat groups have created a new language, or perhaps a new pidgin. E.g.
“LOL my grammer is fine if you dont like it well i dont care.when TEOTWAWKI comes you wont have a chance to care about grammer.FWIW in eighth grade i got IIRC a A+ in english, so there”
No, that’s not a real quote. I just made it up. The point is, as much as that kind of writing annoys us refined Straight Dopers, it’s actually an accepted form of communication in some circles. Let chat group people form their own society, and they’ll be totally unintelligible to the rest of us in a couple of years.
You would be hard pressed to carry on a conversation with someone speaking Middle English. And Old English would be gibberish to you. Languages evolve on time scales much longer than a human life span.
I dare say that a thousand years from now English will be very different. In five thousand years it will be almost unrecognizable.
And if we colonize other worlds…
Voted as: The poster you’d most like to meet.
I demand a recount.
I’m surprised that Ebonics hasn’t been mentioned yet.
WallyM7 has it right, we change 20% of our basic vocabulary per 1000 years. We are making new languages all over the world as we epeak. Come back in 1000 years forthe full effect.
Are you driving with your eyes open or are you using The Force? - A. Foley
** funneefarmer**,i believe, was on the mark when he (she?) brought up ebonics…i can envision there’ll be languages slowly emanating from different cohorts: the techies, the poets, the cultists, the alumnis, the entertainment industry, the current adolescent market, the booomer/aarp members,
i’d ;ove to hear what the lingua franca would be in 500 years.
Renee
I heard a linguist on BBC a couple weeks ago say that in a few hundred years, everyone will speak English. The only other languages left will be the ones spoken by very large populations (i.e., Chinese, Spanish, French, Hindi) and the religious liturgical languages (e.g., Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic).
The whole idea makes me sad.
Well, if the E-o people (esperantists) have their way…
I’m thinking that actually it would probably be some form of English. Hmm i wonder what English will sound like in 300 years.
I myself am an incorrigible conlang slut. I love oral lex.
Hmm. Well, it seems Esperanto has just a little bit of competition these days – among those who think everyone should have at least a dozen of his/her own personally designed languages.
Yeah, there’s really not much hope for anything but English in the future.
As for Ebonics, there are some choice neighborhoods in Oakland I can point you to, where you can get an idea of what the world would be like if Ebonics took over. Just don’t ask me to accompany you to them. I don’t own a bulletproof vest.
Ray (FWIW/BTW, do those speaking languages other than English on the Net chat w/ such abbrevs. of phrases of they’re own langs.?)
A few years ago I came across something that stated that the fastest growing language in the world was Klingon.
Yes, Klingon from Star Trek. They were even holding informal language classes at MIT. Of course it has an advantage: if 50 new people learn it when only 25 people were speaking it before, it grew at an astronomical rate of 200%.
At any rate, it’s a completely new, synthesized language that really doesn’t have any roots anywhere. Does that count?
No, Klingon can’t be considered a real language. A real language is something one can pass on to one’s children. And since having children means getting laid, I don’t think Klingon will be around much longer.
Gypsy: Tom, I don’t get you.
Tom Servo: Nobody does. I’m the wind, baby.
Whoa! Let’s turn the clock back about 2000 years and make a good faith projection about the language everyone will be speaking.
Around the Mediterranean area (a pretty good hunk of geography) we’d be shrugging our sholders and allowing the language to be Latin.
Some 500 years ago who would have projected that the language of some little island across the channel would play a dominant role in world trade?
When, Wally, dammit, when.
–Tim
We are the children of the Eighties. We are not the first “lost generation” nor today’s lost generation; in fact, we think we know just where we stand - or are discovering it as we speak.
Different languages evolve through isolation. I don’t think that’s possible until we get rid of this pesky Internet and TV thing. We’ll loose a lot more languages before we get any new ones.
English changed more in the 250 years between Chaucer and Shakespeare than it has changed in the ensuing 400 years. The printing press intervened, and with widespread literacy came standardization and stability. The sentence structure and grammar have been almost constant for over 400 years now. Words come and go, and some spellings change, but if you hopped in your time machine and visited Shakespeare, you would not need an interpreter. Now, with TV & the Web, the tendency to standardize is even stronger. The only way English will noticeably change is thru the addition of more foreign words, comprende?
Well, English may grow in importance as an international language, but that doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to be able to speak it or even that French or German are going away. It takes a lot of time and effort to learn a foreign language, and if you live in a large country where most of the people speak the same language, there’s little incentive forcing you to learn a new language. That’s a big reason why most Americans are monolingual and why a lot of people in France, Germany, and Japan are not fluent in English. On the other hand, if you live in a very tiny country where your native language is the only place you’d expect to hear it, you’d have a BIG incentive to learn a foreign language so you can travel around and sightsee. (Also, if a lot of foreign visitors pass through your country, you’d also have plenty of opportunities to practice…) That’s why many people in Holland, Denmark, and Belgium are bilingual or even trilingual.
While it would be nice if everybody could understand each other, a lot of languages aren’t going to disappear. India has been independent for half a century, and they STILL can’t get the entire country to learn Hindi. Also in places like the Philipines and Malaysia, the government has tried to de-emphasize English in favor of local languages like Tagalog and Malay…
Even though in the Philippines English is understood by a great many citizens (it was the language of education and government), it’s considered (as I hear) a remnant of the colonial past. Same thing with spanish which has dropped out of favor over the years. Pilipino, which is what the national language is called, is primarily Tagalog with token words from other Philippine languages and dialects.
I myself am an incorrigible conlang slut. I love oral lex.
I think this is the best answer.
Languages are still evolving, English is changing quickly, but the changes we’ll see in a lifetime are fairly small, and we usually change along with them, lessening the subjective difference.
Why? Seems like a great thing, to me. The more people who can understand each other and pool ideas, the more we can do. I’d even imagine it’d help ease a lot of ‘racial’ and religious problems, if people could better understand each other.
(No, I don’t think it’d get rid of war or anything, just help in smoothing out some of the conflicts.)
I’d agree with you guys. Increased communication, especially written, serves to standardize a language.
Languages exist to further communication. If a change comes along (new word, etc) that makes the language more effective, it’ll be adopted. If a change comes along that hinders understanding, it’ll die out. (If fewer people understand it, fewer people exist to spread it on, etc).
Similarly, I think that languages will blend, with useful features of other languages being folded into English, or the local big language, and people stopping using the less used languages. No sense in teaching your children a language that only 10% of your country speaks when you can teach them the main language instead.
Well, this here internet thing is 98% English, and will likely remain that way, for matters of global importance. If you want to compete in the global job market, speaking English is a very important skill.
And once globalization spreads the few major languages to nearly everybody, what incentive is there for people to learn the local language?
I know a bunch of people who took English classes in high school, over the other offered languages, because they wanted to join the internet community, or the modemming community as it was a few years ago. This trend will increase as they find themselves able to compete for information jobs in a much wider market than they ever could in their own language or physical location.