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What Language Will the World Speak In 2115?
An anonymous reader writes: Throughout human history, different languages have emerged and died, waxed and waned in relative importance, evolved, and spread to new locales. An article in the Wall Street Journal considers what languages the world will speak a hundred years from now. Quoting: "Science fiction often presents us with whole planets that speak a single language, but that fantasy seems more menacing here in real life on this planet we call home—that is, in a world where some worry that English might eradicate every other language. That humans can express themselves in several thousand languages is a delight in countless ways; few would welcome the loss of this variety.
Some may protest that it is not English but Mandarin Chinese that will eventually become the world's language, because of the size of the Chinese population and the increasing economic might of their nation. But that's unlikely. For one, English happens to have gotten there first. It is now so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort. We retain the QWERTY keyboard and AC current for similar reasons. ... Yet more to the point, by 2115, it's possible that only about 600 languages will be left on the planet as opposed to today's 6,000. Japanese will be fine, but languages spoken by smaller groups will have a hard time of it."
Some may protest that it is not English but Mandarin Chinese that will eventually become the world's language, because of the size of the Chinese population and the increasing economic might of their nation. But that's unlikely. For one, English happens to have gotten there first. It is now so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort. We retain the QWERTY keyboard and AC current for similar reasons. ... Yet more to the point, by 2115, it's possible that only about 600 languages will be left on the planet as opposed to today's 6,000. Japanese will be fine, but languages spoken by smaller groups will have a hard time of it."
Cardassian of course
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
The Quebec Language Police will maintain the purity of the French race in Quebec. Especially at salad bars.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Meanwhile, /. will still not support Unicode characters outside of a very small whitelist. Historians look upon this as a major factor in why Chinese did not become the dominant world language during the 21st century.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The phrase "We retain ... AC current for similar reasons." makes me believe the author doesn't know what (s)he is speaking about.
Go to the hippest clubs or most-expensive shopping malls in Shanghai or Hong Kong. You'll see elite Chinese and HK kids speaking English, not Chinese. More often than not, they're speaking English with an English accent too.
You don't see elite Western kids in New York or London hanging out and speaking Chinese.
The same goes for rich kids in Rio and Sao Paulo. The same goes for rich kids in Bangkok, Istanbul, Mexico City and Riyadh. The global elite speak English. They're not going to be learning Chinese any time soon.
(The exception is Japan, of course. But Japan is Japan. They're not going to be speaking English any time soon, elite or not).
The issue isn't population numbers. It's what the global 1% are doing. And they're learning English in increasing numbers.
Canadian of course and mukluks will be the shoe of choice unless those Wyld Stalyns have their way.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
The power loss for AC current is less than DC because the voltages are easily transformed reducing P = i^2R. Is there any expectation that will change (assuming the world will not all of a sudden convert to distributed energy...solar isn't that cheap nor is it able to supply baseload)?
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
In only 100 years' time? Nothing much will change, is my guess. Historically, we have seen that Latin(-ish) became dominant in much of Europe, then faded away again with the fading influence of the Roman church, but it held out for a very long time in academic circles - in fact, as a little anecdote, when the Flora Europaea was published from the '60es onwards, there was a debate over whether it should be published in Latin or English, according to the foreword.
English will be the trade language for a long while, but Chinese will grow in influence, no doubt, and may well be the second language in most of Europe. As for language loss - there seems to be a pattern where smaller language groups diminish, but then go through a revival when the speakers become wealthy enough to take an interest in their own, unique identity. Dialects too don't always disappear quickly, so perhaps we won't lose too much.
I personally see no reason why a single language, and particularly English, SHOULDN'T replace other languages eventually. Language barriers continue to be one of the causes of cultural conflict and the existence of many different languages, be it 6000 or 600 or even 6 serves absolutely no practical purpose other than as artificial barriers to communication. If a culture or place wishes to preserve its traditional/ancestral language for ritualistic or ceremonial purposes then so be it, but the official language of every country should absolutely be the same and every person on this planet would benefit from being able to understand every other person. There is simply no good argument against that. I personally hope that it takes less than 100 years to shrink the number of existent dialects, particularly those used by very few people for the purpose of maintaining some artificial sense of cultural independence. You do not have to speak a different language to preserve that different culture; it is only one part of the concept, and not necessarily an essential one.
Imagine an America where even the immigrants spoke fluent English... I know we'll never reach utopia, but I believe that would be a step in the right direction. I personally believe English is a perfectly acceptable candidate for the universal language because, quite frankly, it already is. Most other countries teach it in their school systems to the same degree they teach math and science, unlike in the US where schools offer some arbitrary European languages up to what generally amounts to an intermediate level of mastery. English is the language in which your ideas are most likely to be read and understood.
Cultural unification must eventually occur anyway. Stop fearing the future.
English is doing fine. I don't see it fading away so quickly.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Cylon or Borg
Table-ized A.I.
Being able to understand other cultures to form my own opinions would be great! These awful language barriers feed all manner of stupidity (e.g. wars, distrust, etc.). As for culture transfer? Pshh, whatever man, we have art and poetry for that stuff. We shouldn't mourn progress on that account.
But the flip side is that English is easier to read and write than Chinese (even with its goofy spelling). Those Chinese characters are a royal PITA to learn.
Perhaps a fonetic* version of English will replace the current English spelling mess. Then again, one could do similar with written Chinese, such as Pin-Yin.
* Intentional
Table-ized A.I.
That humans can express themselves in several thousand languages is a delight in countless ways; few would welcome the loss of this variety/p>
Ah yes, the old "Diversity is inherently awesome" chestnut beloved by liberals.
The moral of the fable of babel isn't that God blessed humanity for building the tower, it's that he was pissed and so **cursed** us to all speak different languages. It means the people of the world would always be in strife due to misunderstandings, and would never again be able to organize themselves to affront god. It was something to hobble mankind, not enlighten us or whatever hippie malarkey they're trying to peddle. That there are only going to be 600 languages a hundred years from now is fantastic - it means easier communication, a tighter knit community, less chance of errors or mistakes across populations.
Since most of the former civilized world will have turned into a shit caliphate.
As we will have destroyed the biosphere and will have had to retreat to the underside.
100 years isn't so interesting, maybe after a 1000 years.
By then English shall have fragmented into a bunch of different dialects, quite distinguishable from each other. Even today, try getting a Brit and a Texan into the same room and see if they can communicate. English will just become the root for a bunch of new languages, like Latin was the basis for the Romance languages.
Perhaps there was some convergence during the brief period of broadcast media over the last century, but even that is fragmenting into smaller groups as people tune in to more localized youtube channels... you won't have everyone tuning into a single "impartial" news source anymore with anchors with relatively neutral accents from the midwest.
People like using language to separate themselves from each other.
What about universal translators? In 100 years time, won't they be good enough for general use? :)
-> my bet is that the world will still speak lots of languages and use translators.
In many eastern nations, English is so widely used because it is seen as a neutral language. Many people in southern China who speak Yue Chinese (ie, Cantonese) dislike speaking Mandarin, which is a mutually intelligible language. Likewise in India where there are 7 major language groups comprising over 120 languages and over 1000 dialects and minor languages, many Indians (especially of the upper caste) prefer to use English as opposed to a non-local language. In these cases, English will thrive if only as a dominant second language.
India comes up again for another reason, which is the British Commonwealth. English is widely spoken in these member countries, which comprises a good chunk of the population in Africa and Asia.
I thought the population growth right now was in India, where they speak a lot of English. Of a sort.
And there's no way a closed-wall country like China could have their language exported to the world, no matter how many they are. Especially since the trade language, in China, is English. (Of another sort.)
But here's to hope that the regional languages lives on, because some sort of crippled international English with a vocabulary of 400 words should not be your primary language.
Very nice thoughts. Just to let you know, English ain't my mother tongue.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I don't know. Not long ago the Boston accent was fairly prevelant through Boston suburbs, but now most kids sound like they're from California. There is a trend towards homogenization, and I don't think the desire for locals to distinguish themselves will be expressed through dialect. It's too hard with media so prevelant, and that's not gonna change.
If a language grows to be dominate most likely it won't be one we currently have, more likely it will be a mish mash of existing languages, similar to what English has become.
"English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.”
First of all do not confuse language and dialects. People around here speak Basque, one of those tiny languages which are gong to disappear according to some. But young people here are becoming more and more interested by their cultural heritage and more and more are learning Basque. That is because there is a unification of the several Basque dialects into a single language understood and spoken by all. Dialects have disappeared or are disappearing but the language is reinforced
English is my mother tongue but where I live I had to learn another language, French, in which I am fully bilingual. Right now I am learning Spanish because I live 11 km from the border and it is quite handy. My girlfriend speaks French, Spanish and Basque and has decided to learn some English. Many Europeans speak several languages and it doesn't seem to be an issue for them.
realkiwi
By then English shall have fragmented into a bunch of different dialects, quite distinguishable from each other.
I predict the opposite: because of globalization, there will mostly be only one way to pronounce English, with accents having become a rarity.
I'm afraid 100 years is rather short time for languages to develop. Let's compare 100 years backwards to today. Was the combo platter that much different in 1915?
2015 is only 100 years away, John Backus designed FORTRAN 57 years ago, so it is 1/3 of the way there and still going strong. I suspect that C will still be in use.
Oh, what do you mean spoken ?
Or, as we call the language made from a mish mash of existing languages today: English.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"fragmenting into smaller groups as people tune in to more localized youtube channels"
An interesting thought. I was born in Virginia and work in South Carolina, where I can literally not understand some of the natives. I recently had a British manager, and I work for a German company. English is the common language, but there is certainly not a universal definition of it. I had no problem understanding my British and German co-workers, but the natives...
I had a similar experience in Virginia, less than thirty miles from where I was born. I met a woman who was a native and I could understand maybe thirty percent of what she was saying... And by "understand" I mean I recognized the words she was saying. I had no idea what she was talking about.
Variations of English are the most widely used language in the world at the moment and as so many non-English speaking countries teach English as a second language the trend is likely to continue even if it is not the most appropriate language. One of the key features of English is that it absorbs parts of other languages as it evolves. You can see how english from England has adopted French, German and Gallic words for example and how American English has dropped many of these Anglo French influences and replaced them with other influences such as Italian. Because Mandarin Chinese is difficult for westerners to learn and to be honest we have become quite lazy when it comes to learning languages a large proportion of Chinese people learn English and other languages so they can have more opportunities in business. As greater numbers of Chinese people join in with the English speakers the language will inevitably pick up influences from the Chinese. Just as today you would hardly recognise Ye Olde English from 500 years ago, in another 500 years nobody will recognise the English we speak today.
English is already a mish mash of languages. If you compare English from even 100 or so years ago the changes have been dramatic. Many words in English aren't even English, they have been incorporated from other languages over the last century or two.
. . . as long as they don't have to worry that it's their children who will be denied opportunities by being locked into a boutique language that gives them poorer access to employment, education, and even entertainment.
Some accents / dialects have been growing: e.g. Cockney English rhyming. As a result of it becoming 'popular', actual Cockneys have doubled down and made it harder.
Accents / dialects are "membership" indicators, showing you belong to a community; they take time to learn. There is value in (1) having a common language but also for a community (2) being distinct. I suspect that _bilingualism_ is not going to fade away, though having one common language (English by default) will stay.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
If have got an interesting argument there. Concerning the Portuguese language, it is rather sad Portugal does not invest in the ex-Colonies. Brasil and France have a much stronger presence and are giving far more cultural aid, with a propensity to French overcoming more easily Portuguese. However, I do not believe at all in the dominance of Africa, since corruption has been undermining that corner of the world, and that wont stop ever. If anything, what we are witnessing in Africa is more and more Chinese colonies and interests. A few years ago, they even tried to buy an area in Mozambique up north to build an entire Chinese city. Interestingly enough, some common sense prevailed, and the transaction was not approved at higher instances. They may be corrupt to the core, but after all, are not that stupid.
The language in 2115 will be the language of the first aliens that land on earth and colonize us because they're a million times more advanced than we are.
no, I don't have a sig
The difference between English today and earlier examples like French, German, Latin, Arabic, Greek, Aramaic, etc., is the vast bulk of written material available in English, and increasingly audio and video digital formats, plus the fact that while English is as difficult as any other language to speak well, it is easier than most to speak, and especially to read, passably.
Technology for translation will make that reality less relevant but is unlikely to change the relative positions of the big languages. English, Mandarin, Spanish, and Russian will still have a lot of wealth associated with them.
It is a loss for the world because when a language becomes widespread, it loses a lot of its distinctiveness. English has the grammar that it does largely because the English language community went through several iterations of that process.
Even the phrase "English as the lingua franca" is ironic, since "lingua franca" originally meant a loose version of French, so this phrase really means eg "English is the New French", which of course implies that French was once the obvious final world language that everyone wanted to learn (about a hundred to a hundred fifty years ago) - although it wouldn't have helped them understand the phrase "lingua franca" itself, since that is Latin, the other final world language that everybody wanted to learn - in Roman times.
Languages in societies evolve slowly and inexorably, as most people here know, eg consider the previous meanings of words like hacker or gay etc. This evolution is not always to promote communication, it is often to impede communication among groups as well (which is why the best tool for the job argument fails).
Simple examples where language evolution is intended to make communication more difficult is where teenagers invent their own dialects, eg in school, as a way to exclude grown ups or other undesirables.
When England was invaded by the Norman French in the Middle Ages, the rulers spoke French and expected the subjects to learn the language or suffer the consequences, since the laws were now in French too. There was no concept of trying to improve communication among all people, instead it was a good way of keeping benefits and privileges among a certain group. The English language as the language of the ruling class was later reinstated of course, again as a result of politics, to exclude certain undesirables, and include others. Similar examples exist in other countries, eg when the Mongols invaded China and Mongolian became fashionable as a result.
There's no reason to think that, when China takes over economic leadership from the US, there won't be a wholesale change of the dominant language, with English playing a backwater role after that. This kind of thing has happened several times in the past. Moreover, even if it wasn't necessary, China would benefit more if the world is forced to adapt to its culture - eg its economic dictates, its laws, and its language - rather than if it adapts to world culture. So the ultimate question isn't so much will it happen (I guess there's a small chance China will implode and not become dominant), but when (it will take a generation or two after China becomes dominant for the language to spread universally) .
But that's unlikely. For one, Latin happens to have gotten there first. It is now so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort. We retain the QWERTY keyboard... the Chinese do not use QWERTY, either.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
At least 500 million people know the term 'People Mountain People Sea'
All the four words that made up that term English words, and yet, native English people may be scratching their heads thinking 'what the hell is that ?'
Things like that is happening, not only inside China, but all over the world ... Chinese people are 'borrowing' English words to spice up their communications
And the interesting thing is, the use of English words by the Chinese is by no mean a zero-sum game. The Chinese are not giving up their own Chinese language. The English language to them is yet-another-tool that they can use to talk to others
Automatic translation tools are progressing fast. Within a few years, computers will be able to translate spoken language in real time with a relatively few errors. There are already working prototypes.
It is difficult to see how this will affect the spoken languages over time. If those systems become very efficient then there will be little reasons to learn English or any other major languages. On the other hand, preserving or learning small languages will become less important.
I have no idea how the Chinese learn their hanzi characters though. A quick search indicates the answer is probably a crapload of study and rote memorization ...
So everything that got to do with the Chinese must be "crapload" of whatever stuffs?
Have you really search for the answer or you are talking out of your ass, again?
Do you know how hard is it for the Chinese speakers to learn the alphabetical languages like English?
Do you know how confusing is it when the word "greener" means 'more green' but "corner" does not mean 'more corn'?
At least for the Chinese speaker the words can easily be decipher by taking apart the 'parts' that make up the whole character
Which is why some country are using QWERTZ and AZERTY. And also why some electricity transportation and usage are DC.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Fact is that most Chinese do not speak English, as I have experienced first hand. In fact 30% of the Chinese do not have Mandrin (including local dialects) as their first language: see this list of languages spoken in China. English is now taught at highschool, but not all Chinese do attend highschool. I have noticed that they are usually beter at reading the language than speaking it. I have met Chinese who published scientific papers in English, but could not keep a normal conversation.
... a lot of people don't want it to be English.
100 years isn't so interesting, maybe after a 1000 years.
By then English shall have fragmented into a bunch of different dialects, quite distinguishable from each other. Even today, try getting a Brit and a Texan into the same room and see if they can communicate. English will just become the root for a bunch of new languages, like Latin was the basis for the Romance languages.
Perhaps there was some convergence during the brief period of broadcast media over the last century, but even that is fragmenting into smaller groups as people tune in to more localized youtube channels... you won't have everyone tuning into a single "impartial" news source anymore with anchors with relatively neutral accents from the midwest.
People like using language to separate themselves from each other.
Keep in mind that English accents in actual Britain are already more diverse then several language groups. In fact one of them has been promoted a language. When my grandmother grew up in Arbroath in the 20s and 30s everyone in the County spoke English with a pronounced Scots accent. Now they speak the Scots language.
If you add in the rest of the empire you get accents so strong they could easily be languages in their own right -- such as Singlish and Hinglish -- and people who simply speak with such a strong local accent they are difficult to understand (even Indians speaking English proper tend to have a very strong accent to American and British ears, because they learn it to talk the each-other not you, white boy).
But there's still a huge amount of people who can speak English with a small enough accent that you will be able to understand them. What's goi9ng on is there's an international English accent, which you can hear most easily if you talk to a Swede or Norwegian, and is somewhere between Britain's RP and the Midwest/California accent American newscasters use.
So I suspect that's what'll happen in the future. It'll be like Latin in 700-1800, There'll be dozens of distinct dialects on their way to becoming languages spoken by people who don't want to be particularly important, but anyone who does want to be important will learn the Standard Accent so he can talk to foreigners.
All communications between pilots and air traffic control are in English the world over. This is a point that was missed in the original post. It is one way that English is already the most accepted international language.
"
But that's unlikely. For one, English happens to have gotten there first. It is now so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort.
"
This is relevant because?
History has shown that just because you got there "first" doesn't mean you are going to "win".
I don't see many people writing in hieroglyphics, do you?
English is also only "deeply entrenched" in English speaking countries, and those where the economy is based on tourism.
Look at the Beijing Olympics for an example of how "entrenched" English is in China. I think everyone remembers the pictures of "500 server error" restaurant.
"Mandarin" didnt become the "default" language of China overnight. It came via conquests of smaller states and then converting them to mandarin. This is why China's official language is mandarin, but you often find people who speak another dialect as well.
Case in point, my wife is a native mandarin speaker. She comes from a province that only speaks mandarin. Her cousin speaks mandarin and fuzhou, when he speaks mandarin she understands what he says and this is not true when he speaks fuzhou.
Whatever the "default" language of the future is, it will be done over time and by having a lot of people speaking two (or more) languages.
We'll all be speaking machine language, you insensitive clod!
What do you mean, has become?
It's always been like that. That's the whole point. If it wasn't it'd still be Anglo-Saxon and Norse with a bit of mangled French sprinkled on top.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"English becoming the defacto global lingua franca"
That sentence suggests why. The English language is proven very adapt at including words and phrases from a whole host of other Languages.
e.g
German: Blitz, Bratwurst, Delicatessen, Ersatz, Flak, Frankfurter, Larger, kaput, Muesli, Spritzer, Zeitgeist,
French: au-fait, belle, blase, brunette, cafe, critique, de-rigueur, deja-vue.
Spanish: Amigo, banana, barbecue, breeze, cannibal, cargo.
Japanese: Bonsai, haiku, karaoke, origami, manga, satsuma, tycoon.
Chinese: char, chow, Ketchup
Google will invent a new language with no synonyms to improve searching. Also, every word will have one form. Past tense and future tense will have adverbs. Plural and possessive will have adjectives.
This comment is covered by the Popeye standard disclaimer.
also known as Parseltongue.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Even before the interwebs this argument was garbage.
Films, radio, TV and recorded music mean a person living in 1940s Derby had much more exposure to standard English than someone living in Dacia in 200 A.D. would have to proper (i.e. non-Vulgar) Latin.
I won't even bother mentioning the written word.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Buzzwords will become more common, no doubt.
Mostly, to allow the people who dont understand the correct wording/terminology, fall for yet more marketing adverts aimed at the sub 80 iq population. Buzzwords are essentially a language made up by people who failed English at school, for people who failed English at school.
[Citation needed]
Or if you didn't travel, you'd never know that other people talk funny.
You've actually done a longitudinal study, have you? I'd like to read it, where is it published?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
1. NEWSPEAK - pessimistic option
2. LOLWOWWTF - optimistic option
The differences in English between areas over the last century has become more pronounced not less.
No, I have to agree with the claim that English has gotten very homogenized. Lot of interesting dialects in US and England have near vanished. For example, cockney is not a dialect, but hundreds or thousands of dialects, most which aren't spoken any more. The US dialects just aren't as strong and weird as they used to be. And I bet your wife would have even more trouble with Australian dialects a century ago.
Chinese isn't a single spoken language. There is a single written language, but the spoken variations have drifted apart.
"I'm sorry but I don't speak your Booga Booga language" says people all of the world when they encounter a frustrating situation with a person speaking a miss-matched dialect
It is time for the SciFi language of "standard/common" to get out there. We already have the communicators and they are finally getting close to flying cars. Standard would probably just be English, but people object to English purely for marking reasons. (Western culture coming to destroy our local one.) Call it something else and clean up the last of the junk letters/rules and make it a purely phonetic language and it'll be truly global in 20 years.
People can still have their local lingo, but it's time we moved on.
chinese won't take over for 2 reasons:
- the writing isn't even close to phonetic. older people can't learn it, there's really no such thing as "sounding out"
- the language is tonal. western rhetoric is tonal. if you try to get into an argument in chinese using western rhetoric no one will understand you.
English will just become the root for a bunch of new languages, like Latin was the basis for the Romance languages.
But that happened after the fall of the western empire, once the direct influence of Rome vanished.
... "Firefly"; watch and learn.
I suspect it's far more likely we'll have something close to a "universal translator" that will make it possible to speak with anybody else in the language of their choice in real time. Thus, there won't be nearly as much incentive to learn one particular language in order to communicate in whatever happens to be the lingua franca of the day.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
A mix of Spanish and Mandarin with, oddly, a hint of Innuit. That due to global warming melting the permafrost and revealing The Artifact in 2044.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I predict that in 100 years, that the same amount of homogenization will occur as has occurred in the last 100 years. In other words, none. The top 3 languages will be Mandarin, Spanish, English. The next 3 in possibly changed order will be Hindi, Bengali and Arabic. Then Portugese, Russian, Japanese. Either Punjabi or German will be next, then Javanese or Wu. After that, a smattering of languages in no particular order: Malay/Indonesian, Telugug, Vietnamese, Korean, French, Marathi. Then Tamil, then Urdu or Persian, Turkish. And here is a big upset, I think Cantonese first, then Italian.
Well, that is a top 25. I figure that will do for now.
Will we have one language? No. A few hundred years ago, we had an estimated 7,000 languages. Now we have an estimated 5,000 to 6,500 languages. In 100 years, I would guess we would have perhaps 1,000 fewer languages than today.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I was also born in VA, lived there for 22 years, then went to KS for grad school for 2 years. I came back for a job interview and was told I had a Midwestern accent; I have no accent.
I'm mainly a lurker, but ....
... only ONE person has said anything or looked at us funny.
(rant on)
If I was a betting man, I'd put my money on the continued devolution of English, but it stays dominant due to mass media (music, video, etc). Yes it apparently continues to add new words every few minutes, but the spoken word had devolved to the point that I can hardly stand to listen to some people.
"Ummm, like, you know, we need to do something about that problem, right?"
"Yea, I was, like, gonna say something dude, but you were all..."
"Right. Like, I mean when I heard about it, it made me angry, you know?"
"An then she was, like, you know"
True stories: I was in a meeting with a guy that used "I mean" and "you know" over 100 times in 15 minutes. One stops listening to the message after being bombarded by those fillers. I have another co-worker that uses the word "essentially" as if he has to hit a quota. I'm not a perfect speaker or snobby by any means (I have my share of umms), but damn.... try to keep it simple and say what you have to say without the filler. Make your 2015 resolution to remove "like (unless comparing two things), you know, right, I mean, you know and stupid ass sayings such as "it is what it is" from your lexicon, unless the phrase is essential (damn... I used it) to the conversation. You'll be a better communicator and people may actually listen to you.
(rant off)
On the lighter side: I have a couple of like minded fellows I work with (with respect to frustrations of verbal English annoyances), and we have a game of reverse bingo going on. Bingo is if you hear a word on your corporate-speak bingo board, you mark it off. Reverse bingo is using an unusual or seldom used word (from a list of mutually agreed upon words) properly in a meeting with witnesses (at least one of the "like minded fellows"). The trick is to have it be a natural part of the conversation as if the word was the right word for the moment. Often the word is a bit obscure/seldom used and sometimes is hard to pronounce (and you catch hell if you screw it up). The funny thing is that though we've busted out words such as tenacious, juxtapose, superfluous, equivocate, analogous (an alternative to using 'like'),surreptitiously and deleterious
As the experiment goes on, we think folks either aren't listening or don't want to say anything to show that they don't understand us. I can say that my listening skills have improved and as such, I still shake my head at what people say versus what they wanted to communicate. One fellow told me he wanted to secularize the data (he meant segregate). Another said they were going to socialize a procedure (socialize isn't used that way). Anyhow, I'll do my part to improve the language in my small land of cubicles.
Have a happy new year, sorry for the long post and happy communicating.
So, can Hinglish speakers comprehend those who speak Bombay Welsh?
You mean when their TV and radio stations stopped broadcasting?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Single world language is a great thing, and I don't care if it's Spanish, Chinese or (most likely) broken English. We will get much better science when everyone can instantly read everyone else's research. With that come huge tangible improvements to our lifestyle, like clean energy, high yield/nutrition crops and cure for cancer. Next, wide access to world news and entertainment will reduce armed conflict and increase people's demands on their own governments. Even non-political soap operas invite the question of "why the frak can't we live like this".
Once we are done with language, I think we will end racial conflict by ending race. This is well underway in SF Bay Area. Nobody under the age of 30 really cares. After a few generations of gene mixing, there will be no large homogenous groups that can gang up against others.
Oh sure, there will be holdouts. I envision pure Caucasian villages in Wyoming where conservatives can, with full public support and protection, practice their indigenous hunting, armed self protection, petrol-based lifestyle, "traditional family" culture and religion. They will probably refuse government-provided healthcare in favor of homeopathy mixed in whisky and enjoy booming trade with Amish.
Yes, English is by far the most practical and easiest to write in because Chinese and Japanese with their bombardment of characters to learn to write and pronounce requires too much time and discipline to master. Korean I am told is simpler. The grammars for Chinese, Japanese and Korean are simpler than English and Latin languages. That explains why there are so many people that speak Chinese/Japanese, but it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone likes to write in these languages. In fact both my wife and mother-in-law seem to avoid writing Chinese or English anything altogether. I can vouch French writing is a big PITA all because the elders of the French Academy decided to make it so. I won't assume anything about Italian and Spanish, but would love to hear if it's also a big PITA to write in those languages.
Perhaps if romanized pinyin/hangul-romaja/Katakana-Hiragana merged together and China/Japan/Korea adopted that rather than writing in traditional characters, they're vocabularies and grammars could potentially overtake English as the most popular language on the planet.
Why place so much effort on according stuff with special suffixes everywhere when writing just to conform to traditional discipline and cultural norms? The world itself has bigger problems to focus its efforts on than emanating correct spelling and aesthetically beautiful writing. It is true computers help us with these spelling/aesthetics problems, but shouldn't it be a priority to get everyone one the planet to understand each other in order to unite rather than oppress? We all have thoughts to express about the world regardless of spelling and aesthetics aptitudes.
The reason that languages fragmented in the past was that populations were fragmented and rarely communicated. That is not the case today. Increasingly concentrated mass media in English will cause accents and dialects of English to converge. Mind you, the root English will also evolve over hundreds and thousands of years, but eventually, everyone will speak this root English.
01 1001 00110.
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Quebec is a weird case.
KFC is KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) in France.
KFC is PFK (Poulet Frite Kentucky) in Quebec.
Because laws.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I honestly expect Mandarin/Cantonese to remain the dominant language on the planet, just as it is today.
Chinese isn't "dominant".
If you walk in to a shop in Paris or Berlin and are Chinese, chances are that the shopkeeper will speak to you in English (not French or German), because they get so many foreigners and all foreigners speak English. Sure, if you look for the shops with hanzi, you'll be more likely to be greeted in Chinese, but for just random shops around the world in areas with lots of foreigners, you'll be spoken to in English, until you correct them.
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There's also a large body of literature and poetry which does not translate well to Mandarin pinyin that would essentially be made inaccessible to the general public unless they learnt block characters as well, which seems more like a step back to a time when education was for the rich and well-connected and women had to bind their feet...
Ah, you don't like the idea of two independent and unrelated written representations of spoken language, not which one is used. That's a different complaint. Pinyin is necessary, even if you find it abhorrent.
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The question is therefore moot.
There's more French than German in the English language.
You are comparing apples with oranges. Our common, everyday words are far more like German than French: bruder=brother (vs. frere), Ich war = I was (vs. j'étais) etc. However our more complex words are largely from French e.g. economics=economiques (vs. Wirtschaft).
One of the things which makes French so much easier than German to speak for an Englishman is that if you don't know the word (which usually means rarer vocabulary) you can often get away by picking a suitable English word and saying it with a French pronunciation (it does not always work but it is worth a try). With German you cannot do that since the overlap is with the simple, everyday words that you learn when you learn the language. This makes it far harder to both speak and to understand since you have to relearn every word in German whereas with French not so much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(and the TV show it is in reference to of course).
And on the Eighth Day, Man created God.
Don't worry - we still won't listen, so the lack of speaking shouldn't present any major problems.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The reason that languages fragmented in the past was that populations were fragmented and rarely communicated. That is not the case today. Increasingly concentrated mass media in English will cause accents and dialects of English to converge. Mind you, the root English will also evolve over hundreds and thousands of years, but eventually, everyone will speak this root English.
That may have been true for a brief period over the last 50 years of broadcast TV. It used to be like, "OMG, the President is on! He's on EVERY CHANNEL! I'm gonna miss Mr. Ed!" But not all content comes out of Hollywood anymore... big productions have increasingly come out of cheaper studios in Vancouver, Australia, "Bollywood", and will continue to expand as the tools get cheaper. With more channels made accessible by the internets, people are becoming more selective and distrustful, pigeonholing themselves in their own little cultural niche with content that matches their precious little worldview. We already have lots of people rejecting the "mainstream" liberal media, or conversely religious or conservative programming. People tune off a channel as soon as they hear rap music, or country drawl, or BBC / Harvard lecture documentary. People do this to themselves to distinguish themselves from "those people", and it's only going to get easier.
Sure, global corporate English will be sought after by many to participate in trade and commerce, but that also seeks to distance itself from the masses so they can quickly tell their own, college-educated ranks from the imposters. College degrees will be harder to attain, and even if you do, your peers will be able to ascertain which sorry decade you got your MBA or BSCS by how dated your buzzwords are to their paradigm shift. Grammar Nazis will still be in no short supply, however.
Regardless of the language, hopefully by 2115 they will stop using variations of the word "own" to mean "defeat".
Real-time audio translation is just taking off. By 2115 everyone should be able to speak and hear others speak in whatever language they like, including perhaps one that they and their personal AI made up as they were growing up.
By then English shall have fragmented into a bunch of different dialects, quite distinguishable from each other.
Such fragmentation will no longer occur. Television and Internet has connected us all, and more cultures are getting online. In 100 years I suspect that effectively everyone that wants to be online will be able to do so. The isolation necessary for such fragmentation will only occur under rather strict conditions that seem only possible now through religious conviction.
The rest of us that aren't part of some Luddite religion will communicate with a billion other people. Does that mean we'll all switch to English or Mandarin? Possibly. But it seems more likely that people will learn second and third languages through the excellent education opportunity that the internet provides. Today an English native speaker is able to learn Swahili or Japanese and write and speak to native speakers. With the right incentive I think more people (Americans) might become multilingual. That incentive could be a change in the public education system, or a new fad hobby.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's kinda cool that we can witness this process in real time, as populations in Singapore, India, etc. gradually adopt more English vocabulary, norms, and syntax. Singapore is a great example of this phenomenon... say a Cantonese-speaking guy marries a Malay-speaking girl. Neither one of them speaks "native" English; they both have an accent. But they also can't speak each others' native tongue. Their only shared language is "broken" English... and that's what their kids grow up with as their native language.
Living in Taiwan all these years, I find myself confronted with a host of different accents and dialects that I would never have encountered back home in Iowa. I've heard all manner of "English" from Kiwis, Ozzies, Scousers, Paddies, etc... not to mention folks from other language families altogether.
Even as the old divisions fade away, you can see the new divisions emerge...
To quote Mr. Spock... Fascinating!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Moisture vaporator binary.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The trend toward homogenization is based on communication as well, and since the goal seems to be encouraging everyone, everywhere to be able to communicate with everyone else, everywhere else, that will only help make everyone sound more similar to each other than before.
In Europe, already a large portion of the population speaks English, technically as a second language, but almost as effectively as their first. Numerous European pop music groups have sung just about the entire body of their work in English even though they're not from English-speaking countries (ABBA, Aqua, Rednex, etc) and are most popular in countries that never were established by the British Empire.
French could have had this level of expansion, but French has been intentionally held back as language, new words are basically forbidden. This has meant that large combinations of words to describe new things have been necessary when English simply creates new words or appropriates words from other languages as needed.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Or if you didn't travel, you'd never know that other people talk funny.
Don't be daft, I don't travel much and yet run into lots of people with different dialects of English including one guy from the north of England who I have to really struggle to understand and another who is a native Italian who learned English in Australia, very interesting trying to understand him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Soulskill, when the walls fell. Bennett, his arms wide. Bennett and APK at Slashdot.
Where did this guy go to school... the old Scandinavian language was Norse you even have remnants of it in english streetnames etc..... and people speaking and writing Faroese or Icelandic will still today to a wide extent be able to read and understand Norse.... English as a world language in the Scandinavian and other Nordic countries has by no means suppleanted any of the languages spoken there...
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At the rate we are going we will all be speaking emoji.
It's not just that the French have an Academie that defines the language rules. It's also that the French Kings and later Parisian governments spent centuries imposing their language on the rest of France, banning the use of Provencal and Breton and Basque and all the other regional languages, whether Romance or Celtic or other.
Bill Stewart
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Doubtful. English has barely changed at all in the last 100 years, even though the world has changed immensely since WWI. Any literate English speaker can pick up an English-language book from the early 1900s and read it with very little difficulty. In that time, we've gone from the British Empire never having the sun set on it, to going through two world wars, a cold war, the British Empire completely falling apart, the USA turning from a mostly agrarian nation into the world's largest superpower and a huge industrial and technological economy. Despite all that change in the two major English-speaking nations, the language hasn't changed much at all.
Remember, we're talking about what languages we'll speak in 100 years, not 500 or 1000.
English is at its core a Germanic language. The grammar's descended from German versions of Indo-European, not Romance or Celtic versions, and if you take the basic vocabulary it's Anglo-Saxon. (For instance, the 1000-2000-word Basic English subsets are almost all Germanic.) There's a lot of French layered on top of it, from the Norman conquest, but it's mostly vocabulary and fancier words, not the core language. (And technical jargon being derived from Latin and Greek doesn't count; that's an artifact of Latin being the lingua franca of educated people for centuries.)
Bill Stewart
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Yep, English is the Borg of languages. You will be assimilated. It actually works quite effectively.
I can't speak for Chinese or Korean, but Romanized Japanese is a pain in the ass. Even writing only in the Kana, Japanese is rough. The Kanji isn't actually that difficult to learn, helps greatly with understanding the language and even learning only a couple hundred characters (which can be done fairly quickly) can help immensely (also, the more you learn, the easier they get). A benefit to non native speakers is that each character has an abstract meaning associated to it that can often be learned in the student's native tongue. Even if the student forgets how to read/pronounce the character, as long as the character isn't being used solely for phonetic properties, the student can probably get a basic understanding of any signs/documents using those characters. I'm a bit out of practice with my Japanese, I couldn't "read" a sign to you in the traditional sense of the word "read", but if it includes characters I still remember, I can still provide you the general gist. It may not sound useful, but being able to differentiate male and female toilets is often a useful skill when travelling, as well as being aware of warnings.
A lot of this is lost when the language is Romanized, and can even make translation difficult as the Kanji don't represent "words" as much as they represent abstract meaning.
English and its (relatively) close relatives do well with Romanized characters as they've evolved together for quite some time and therefore seem natural and simpler to native speakers. Japanese got a hell of a lot easier to learn once I got over my apprehensiveness about learning Kanji.
01010100 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01100100 01100101 01110010 00100001
"By then English shall have fragmented into a bunch of different dialects, quite distinguishable from each other. Even today, try getting a Brit and a Texan into the same room and see if they can communicate. English will just become the root for a bunch of new languages, like Latin was the basis for the Romance languages."
In the past that would have been norm. But unless we descend into a Mad Max dystopia where technology retreats into a permanent dark age, the differences between cultures are more likely going to be sandpapered over until only the most significant ones remain. Why? Blame it on the Internet, what with people all over the world consuming more and more the same bland YouTube, Twitter and Facebook culture. Chinese is likely to remain Chinese (hell, they even have their own versions of YouTube and Twitter), but we'll gradually see the evaporation of the distinctions between British and American English.
So the Scousers will start talking like Scandinavians, Cockney will die out, and the US South will forget "ain't"? Not bloody likely.
The educated elite speaking solely the standard version of English is probably going to be much higher then the Latin-onlies, but there's no way in hell America's white working class is going to Foreignize their accents. Much less the black working class.
The article is based on three huge false premises: 1. That languages become simpler as they're spread by adult learners. This is false because the simplifications (say, loss of Old English case endings) trigger new complexities (in this instance, new word order rules). 2. That tonal languages are especially hard for learners. Actually, many features of English are equally hard if your language doesn't have them: consonant clusters, tenses, stress timing etc. 3. That Mandarin cannot dominate because Chinese characters are too hard. But Pinyin romanization (i.e. Latin letters) is simple, easy, and known by native speakers and learners alike. so it could be that Chinese written in Pinyin comes to dominate outside China.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
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By that time the telecoms will have completely taken over people's social interactions and there will be no 'spoken' language. All text in small chunks. Sex will be done by switch across the internet. As soon as we get rid of all this silliness like living and socializing and get straight into the buying shit the better off our overlords will be.
I would love for American English to be simplified further. The spelling reforms of American English are great and more spelling reforms could be made, and our grammar could use reforms too. I think we could get by without different verb conjugations for plural and singular nouns. We should also do away with vestigial gendered nouns like actor and actress or waiter and waitress. We only need one of each noun. Can you guys think of other simplifications that could be implemented? I am an Anglophone so I am probably not the best person to ask about how to simplify English further.
I am new to Slashdot.
...
Keep in mind that English accents in actual Britain are already more diverse then several language groups. In fact one of them has been promoted a language. When my grandmother grew up in Arbroath in the 20s and 30s everyone in the County spoke English with a pronounced Scots accent. Now they speak the Scots language.
"Already"? Methinks you are reversing the history of English in Britain.
The diversity of dialects in Britain are of ancient origin. 1200 years ago, when they were still speaking Old English (a different language from Modern English for certain) there were major regional variations - particularly between southern England and the north (Northumbria and lowland Scotland).
When Old English evolved into Middle English, a new language, the Middle English spoken in the north was quite different from that spoken in the south, and as Modern English developed was well on its way to splitting off into a separate language. The Act of Union with England in 1707 put a stop to that, and from that time on (actually the process started earlier, aided by the printing press) the divergence between Scots English, and the English of southern England became steadily less divergent.
You are observing ancient linguistic divisions that are in the process of vanishing, not new divisions that are emerging.
If the Scots dialect has replaced Standard English (as it is known) in Arbroath in recent years it is the conscious revival of a dying dialect, not the development of "new language".
Also about the claim that dialects (not accents) in England are more diverse that several language groups... well, [citation needed].
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Except that The World doesn't speak English.
We do speak a ton of other languages, some potentially rivalling English as "lingua franca" such as Spanish, Mandarin and Hindi.
I really don not understand why under the moniker "The World" you guys in America always make the assumption "World=USA"
Even is sports, which is actually laughable as your "football" and "baseball" are nothing but exotic games seen in the movies for the rest of the planet were we play _real_ FOOTBALL, and of course talk in a myriad of local languages and most of them will be doing all right in 100 years too.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
You do realize that in the 20s what we call Middle English and Early/Middle Scots were all considered different dialects of English? The decision to change the terminology referring to Scots from "dialect" to "language" was not due to Linguists running some complex Comparative Linguistics program on their computers and concluding that the degree of influence between Scottish dialects of English and English-English were X% higher then the Standard Linguistics Differential Test (Note: there is no such test), it was because Unionism got much much weaker in recent decades. To quote the first paragraph of Wikipedia on the issue:
Because there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots.[8] Although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects do exist, these often render contradictory results. Broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with Scottish Standard English at the other.[9] Scots is often regarded as one of the ancient varieties of English, yet it has its own distinct dialects.[8] Alternatively, Scots is sometimes treated as a distinct Germanic language, in the way Norwegian is closely linked to, yet distinct from, Danish.[8]
In my Grandma's day staunch Unionists dominated Scots politics, so arguments that the language the Scots spoke was merely a dialect of the same language that Londoners speak were taken extremely seriously. Nowadays everyone is a Nationalist to some extent or other, so they come down on the opposite side of the entirely arbitrary question of where one language stops and another begins.
As for language groups, try the North Germanic Group. The Romance and Slavic language families are also pretty well-known for high mutual intelligibility. You learn Italian and you can't really have a full conversation with a Brazilian, but you could probably find out where your hotel is. And I haven't mentioned the Serbian/Croat/Bosniak, Malay/Indonesian, Urdu/Hindi language comboes. In all three cases it';s possible to converse with someone for literally hours in one before you figure out they think they're speaking another language.
OTOH when I took two of my yankee friends to see Gosford Park back in the early 2000s the only British accent they understood at all was from the guy who was playing an American pretending to be Scottish. There are Americans I can't understand. Even in Cleveland about once every six months I meet somebody whose black vernacular is so strong I have to tell them to spell out the words they're saying (my favorite was the guy who said "A-new-tees and Roya-tees" and apparently meant "Annuities and Royalties," my black boss and several black co-workers could not figure out what that guy meant).
...the unchanging lingua of medicine, church, law, and many sciences.
English will die through ad hoc overmorphing; e.g., people using "alot" and "is comprised of..." . I just made up a word, so I'm guilty too.
Grammar Nazis will still be in no short supply, however.
You can not end a sentence with "however".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Latin transformed into the Romance languages after the collapse of the Western Empire caused the lines of communication to break down, allowing regional differences to become exaggerated. With 21st century communications media, that won't be able to happen.
I won't assume anything about Italian and Spanish, but would love to hear if it's also a big PITA to write in those languages.
Spanish and Italian suck because of low information density. To many letters/syllables to make your point. http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.f... (Table 1 on Page 40).
1) Internets and Computer Science are dominated by English.
2) Traditional Science is dominated by English. http://science.slashdot.org/st...
3) Globalization has promoted English into other markets (Indian tech companies, Chinese manufactures).
4) Wealthy tend towards it globally.
5) If online video games have taught me anything it is that any 12 year old can learn enough English to at least say nasty things or mock me.
6) Ease of travel has also inordinately promoted English at least in tourist locals.
7) USA media and Hollywood. Media creators in the US for TV and movies also promote English. Why Canada has Canadian content laws, and Quebec, Canada has Language laws.
So give current trends, I would say that English will continue to increase it's domination. That said, it isn't to say that as a result that English may change dramatically as other cultures make it their own. Also that isn't to say that many of the more "primary" languages aren't going anywhere anytime soon, but perhaps more of a multilingualism going on, and bastardization of local languages. Look at Quebec and French for example in Canada. I took French immersion in school, but driving across Quebec I have heard things like "Le Tire" at a gas station for example...
Of course all of this could change if something drastic happens, but it would be on the level of Robotic Overlords subjugating the Human race forcing us to learn binary or something...
Haskell
While you may be correct, that's not an indication that English hasn't changed. The question might be asked, could a literate speaker from the early 1900s pick up an English language book from today and read it with the same ease that going the other way would be?
Modern English is a superset of English from back then. That's still significant change, even if it's not the kind of radical change that the "English" of 6 or 700 years ago would be.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
The question might be asked, could a literate speaker from the early 1900s pick up an English language book from today and read it with the same ease that going the other way would be?
It depends on the book. If it's a computer book, certainly not. If it involves modern technology at all, probably not, without learning a bunch of new terms. If it's a historical fiction novel (set in a time no later than the early 1900s, perhaps something written by Ken Follett), then he shouldn't have much trouble at all. There might be a handful of new words he won't recognize, but not many.
Do they have loud voices, or are your ears very sensitive?
I see you're still dodging your original claim about trends over time.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Sure, you could find something he could read. But for the vast majority of books, it would be more than new technology, it would be new concepts, new knowlege, new *memes*.
A police procedural thriller, a medical drama, a spy novel, etc. would have new vocabulary, but more importantly, new concepts behind the vocabulary. And none of it explained, because a modern reader would already understand them.
I heard somewhere (yeah, yeah, I don't have a citation handy) that English has something like 5 times as many words as it did when Shakespeare was around. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of those were added in the last hundred years.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
The same works in the other direction, though. English does have more words than in Shakespeare's time, but it's also lost a lot of words since then. Shakespeare plays are full of words that we no longer use. Quick, what does "exeunt" mean? We've lost a lot of expressiveness words and gained a ton of technology words. Moreover, your average English speaker (someone who's never read Shakespeare) is barely or completely unfamiliar with the culture at that time, and wouldn't understand a lot of concepts that were common in those days. It wouldn't be nearly as bad as for the person in the past coming to the future, because life certainly is more complex now, but it would still be a difficulty.
"By then English shall have fragmented into a bunch of different dialects". What's this "by then"? Allow me to introduce you to Professor Henry Higgins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...