Predicting the future of the English language is rather easy, in the short term. The odds are, over the next few decades its New World dialects are going to gain increasing global dominance, accelerating the demise of thousands of less fortunate languages but at long last allowing a single advertisement to reach everybody in the world. Then after a century or two of US dominance some other geopolitical grouping will gain the ascendancy, everyone will learn Chechen or Patagonian or whatever it is, and history will continue as usual. Ho hum. But apart from that… what might the language actually look like in a thousand years time? For comparison, the English spoken at the turn of the last millennium looked like this:
1000 AD: | Wé cildra biddaþ þé, éalá láréow, þæt þú tǽce ús sprecan rihte, forþám ungelǽrede wé sindon, and gewæmmodlíce we sprecaþ… |
---|---|
2000 AD: | We children beg you, teacher, that you should teach us to speak correctly, because we are ignorant and we speak corruptly… |
(From the Colloquy of Ælfric.) So how far will another thousand years take it? I've already got pages about time travel and languages in SF, plus a conlang of no very specific origin; this addition, vaguely inspired by the precognitive Darwinism of Dougal Dixon's “After Man: A Zoology of the Future”, should fit in nicely. It has also now acquired companion pages titled Pleistocenese, Alternese, and Europan.
2013 POSTSCRIPT: for its tenth anniversary (we're one percent of the way there already, folks!) I have finally updated this page to use Unicode for its phonetic symbols instead of seven‐bit ASCII workarounds. It has taken until now for browsers to support “stacked” diacritics at all reliably, and the results can still be rather ugly! In the process I have changed my notation slightly to take advantage of some of the more appropriate glyphs now available.
Before I start developing a “future history” of my own I'll run through a quick survey of the existing literature. It's a bit sparse, though, since academic linguists know better than to try, and nobody else has ever shown much interest – except of course the supporters of language‐planning projects like Esperanto or Basic English, which are a bit off‐topic (though they did inspire George Orwell to produce one famous vision of the language of tomorrow). Most genre Science Fiction ignores linguistic barriers between centuries just as it does all the other kinds – reasonably enough, since they get in the way of the plot – but a handful of stories can be picked out as featuring representations of “Futurese”:
2022 ADDENDUM: last year's reread of “classic” science fiction unearthed some further examples worth mentioning.
- On the topic of temporal barriers… the morphologically regularised 25th‐century English of Anthony Boucher's “Barrier” may be ludicrous as a prediction, but it bees just obtrusive enough to provide flavour without derailing his narrative.
- Both Heinlein's “By His Bootstraps” and Larry Niven's “A World out of Time” imagine “dictator” being the only word to survive from modern English (as “diktor” in Heinlein's fiftieth century, “dikta” in Niven's 30,000th). Personally I'd be surprised if that consonant cluster makes it much past the thirtieth.
- Then again, John W. Campbell Jr.'s “Forgetfulness”, set tens of millions of years in the future, features an abandoned city of “N'yor”. For comparison, Old York was known barely a couple of millennia ago as “Eburākon” – which must have been a fairly new name for a place inhabited through the Bronze Age by speakers of languages we know nothing about.
Let me get one thing clear: there's nothing wrong with languages changing over time.
When looking at a biological “family tree” (such as the evolutionary history of the horse), the general public insists on seeing any movement as intrinsically “progressive”, moving from “primitive” to “advanced” designs. Yet somehow when looking at the linguistic equivalent (such as the development of the Romance languages from Vulgar Latin) they see exactly the reverse – any change is proof that the language is in decline. In reality they're just as wrong both times!
The attitude is perfectly understandable; membership of a linguistic community is an important social marker, so people often get neurotic about the way they speak, and cling to the security blanket of vaguely remembered schoolroom mandates, despising those barbarians who split infinitives or mispronounce “shibboleth”. Ironically, it's this same group‐membership effect that's responsible for many of the changes (see below), but the degeneration the purists warn against is an imaginary danger anyway. English has gone from being a minor Germanic tongue on Europe's fringe, with a vestigial system of inflections signposting case, mood, gender, and so on, to being a much more weakly inflected language dominating the global landscape. Every step of the way, old fogeys moaned that it was going to the dogs; but although the noun‐gender system of Old English has crumbled away entirely, it turns out not to have been a structural support in the first place… and the simplifications have been balanced by increased complexity in other places, such as in the sheer size of the vocabulary.
Changes can occur in every aspect of a language:
These different types of language change don't happen in isolation – the blurring of word‐final sounds erodes grammatical features, the development of new ways of stringing syllables together triggers shifts in pronunciation, and so on. Nevertheless, my futurological efforts will be based purely on projected sound changes, since they tend to be astonishingly regular and thus offer the easiest opportunities for mock‐ups of Futurese.
There's a widespread popular assumption that modern technology (gramophones, cinema, CNN etc.) will stop languages changing in the new millennium, because these days everybody knows what everybody else's accent sounds like. But accents such as Cockney never did arise because working class Londoners were unaware of how the aristos talked. They knew perfectly well; but that wasn't the accent they grew up with, and there was no reason to want to imitate it when their own accent was a badge of solidarity with their peer‐group. Nothing has happened to reduce the allure of a distinctive way of speaking as a badge of in‐group membership; and the more positively people identify with some particular accent, the more likely that high‐status speech variety is to drift, as social climbers refine their vowels while the native speakers react to being imitated by innovating further. Linguists studying modern “Network English” find that it has several regional subvarieties, which are diverging rather than converging.
That's not to say that technology has no effects. For a start, when the global media bring linguistic communities into contact with one another, that can have all sorts of unforeseeable results – for instance, we loaned the Japanese the words “walk” and “man”, and got them back compounded. The opportunities for interactions like that will inevitably increase as the number of non‐native speakers of English continues to rise.
Over the centuries, language change has been affected in various minor ways by innovations such as the printing press (there were no spelling‐based pronunciations such as “almond”‐with‐an‐L until there were misleading standard spellings), and of course Chaucer didn't have a word for “helicopter”. It's easy to imagine other technological developments that might have further‐reaching effects in the future:
I'm going to have to leave possibilities such as this for another day – not only because they raise questions about the real likelihood of 3000 AD Earth being inhabited by hominids that still bring their young up to speak a traditional wild‐grown language but also because they don't make the language's future form any more predictable.
On the other hand, some factors do show long‐term directional influences. An obvious one is ease of use: people won't bother saying “omnibus” when “bus” will do, or “environment” when their friends are getting away with “emviromment”. But another factor is that the language has to work as a language; any change that impedes communication spurs the development of workarounds – so, for instance, people who pronounce “pen” and “pin” indistinguishably soon start talking about “ink pens”. And a third, less obvious influence is ease of learning. Children forming their initial mental model of how English works don't want to believe it's a mess of random idioms; any regularities they notice (like “past tenses end in ‑ED”) are extended by analogy as far as their peers will let them (“bended”). All these consistent “trends” in language change make prediction more feasible, or at any rate, less obviously hopeless.
Nonetheless, futurology is a mug's game, and I don't expect my “predictions” to come true. My methodology consists of nothing more rigorous than applying some of the kinds of changes that are commonly seen in historical linguistics and seeing what further development patterns they suggest; it's just a bit of fun, intended to dramatise the way things might plausibly end up if things go on the way they always have. You could come up with something completely different and at least as plausible by extrapolating from the Northern Cities Vowel Shift…
2005 ADDENDUM: I've mentioned the two commonest misconceptions about language change – that it's a bad thing, and that it has stopped; but a few other odd assumptions seem to be more widespread than I'd realised, so perhaps I'd better deal with them here so I don't have to carry on doing it in email.
- “It's changes in vocabulary that matter.”
- Monoglots often seem to think of languages as consisting of wordlists and nothing else! Slang does serve as one of the most obvious markers of variation; but this is a superficial kind of change, often reversed a decade later, and rarely extending to the core vocabulary. Meanwhile, shifts in vowel‐sounds or verb‐endings attract less attention, but they're cumulative and systematic; and it's these, not the vocabulary churn, that make 1000 AD English unintelligible.
- “All changes can be traced back to the influence of other languages.”
- After the Norman Conquest, the eclipse of English as a standard language made it easy for dialectal variant forms to get established, but apart from a transfusion of loanwords, the changes themselves were things that had already been going on before the French‐speakers turned up. Grammatical “cross‐contamination” between neighbouring languages is the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, it's rare for changes to have obvious “causes” at all.
- “English is a pidgin.”
- No, pidgins arise as grammarless codes for rough‐and‐ready communication between people who have no language in common. If it has native speakers, it isn't a pidgin! English isn't even a “creole”, the kind of language that's formed when a pidgin becomes a mother‐tongue. However, the trace of truth in this myth is that being used as an auxiliary language often seems to trigger languages to become more “streamlined”.
I'm hoping not to have to turn this section into a “Language Change Myths FAQ”, since that would be a lifetime's work!
I've delayed defining some of this glossary stuff in the hope of suckering people into reading this far, but if you want to follow the next few sections it's important to understand the difference between…
sample
anaesthetisethe same way as I do, but spelling reform is not the topic here (and nor is the kind of so‐called “bad grammar” that's really just non‐standard spelling and punctuation).
(If you're wondering where the brackets are,
sorry: it'll be because your browser is ignoring my CSS…)
Bored already? If you can't be bothered with all this
you can always just take my word for it and skip to the
end where I give examples of the final result. Otherwise
here are definitions of a few phonological terms I'll be using to
get there:
waddle.
The last thing I ought to say before I switch from “documentary” mode to “speculative fiction” mode is this: if you aren't familiar with Comparative Reconstruction then my predicted sound changes are bound to seem wildly unlikely. If I'd shown Julius Caesar a schedule of the changes that were to turn Latin into Italian (“PS: beware the Ides of March”) he wouldn't have believed a word of it either. And yet languages really do behave this way, with “mutations” in the system of sounds adding up to new accents, new languages, new family trees of descendant tongues… witness this Wikipedia entry on one big‐name sound change, Grimm's Law.
∼1385 AD: | Ye knowe eek that in forme of speche is chaunge With‐inne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so, And spedde as wel in love as men now do |
---|
(From Chaucer's “Troilus and Criseyde”. Note that for Geoffrey, “do” and “so” rhymed, but “price” and “nice” didn't.)
I'm using a gerrymandered starting point here: please note that the phonology described below isn't precisely that of any major present‐day US accent (although it is close enough for plausibility – close enough indeed that this section is essentially a summary of existing trends). Instead it's just one of the accents that will be current in a century or so: the one that happens to be ancestral to the thirty‐first‐century language.
pickis pronounced pɪɡ (note: the compound phoneme tʃ as in
itchcounts for this rule as a single sound). However, the words
pickand
pigare still distinct – see below on vowel breaking.
bittyis pronounced ˈbɪɾi. This “flapping” context never triggers vowel breaking –
bittyand
biddyare pronounced identically.
bondis pronounced bɑ̃d. Immediately following plosives may also be nasalised (thus bɑ̃n).
buildis now simply bɪl); nd in unstressed contexts simplifies similarly (thus
Englandbecomes ˈɪŋɡlən).
abominableturns into
'bom'nable. Unstressed i, u tend to become nonsyllabic (turning into the approximants j, w), and other unstressed vowels reduce towards the “schwa” ə.
pickis pɪɡ while
pigis pɪɪ̈ɡ. See below for details.
beer, beam, bean, and
peel=
pill(a recent merger)
beat, i
bead, iï
bring,
pin,
him, where it is indistinguishable from ɛ as in
pen,
hem
bit, ɪ
bid, ɪɪ̈
Mary=
merry=
marryand in
bale, bane, blame, bang(n.b. that last is beŋ, not baŋ)
bait, e
bayed, eë
bell(and see above on
pen)
bet, ɛ
bed, ɛɛ̈
pal, ban, bam
bat, æ
bad, ea
ah/aw/o)
bar, borrow, ball, pawn, bomb, bong
bot, ɑ
bod, ɑə
for=
foreand in
bowl, bone, foam
boat, o
bode, oɔ
about; for unstressed syllables involving sonorants see below on “Syllabic Consonants”.
bulk, bun, bum, bung
but, ʌ̈
bud, ʌ̈ə
put, ʊ
good, ʊʊ̈
pool, boon, boom, and
woman(a recent shift from ʊm)
boot, ʉ
food, ʉɵ
coin; however,
boilis a disyllable, ɔɪ ɫ̩
quoit, ɔɪ
void, oɛ
prowl, brown
bout, au
proud, it tends towards aə, becoming indistinguishable from ai as in
pride
bile, mime, brine
bite, ai
pride, it tends towards aə, becoming indistinguishable from au as in
proud
fury, poor, murderercan function as a stressed vowel, varying from a merely “tongue‐bunched” ʊ˞ or ɚ to a full ɹ̴̩.
pullablefirst as ʊɫ and then as ɫ̩.
Adam, Eden, but are always unstressed.
By this time the language has fallen out of fashion; the phonemic analysis given here is the one used retrospectively in the subsequent “Classical” period. The vocabulary shrinks and is later restocked with borrowings, but many of them are returns, and the basic core of the language remains Germanic.
pickis now piɡ, while
pigis piaɡ (see below on vowel‐breaking).
sixbecomes sis (but is not voiced to siz).
threeshifts to become a new tr.
quitbecomes kvid.
weedbecomes wid, not wjid. Preceding r or l has the same effect (
reedbreaks to rid), but h gives way itself (
heedbreaks to jid).
bee, beer, bill, peel, bean, beam) is unchanged
beat) becomes i j
bead) becomes j i
bit) becomes i
bid) becomes i a
bay, bear) is unchanged; before l or a nasal (
bale, bane, blame, bang) it becomes j e
bait) becomes e j
bayed) becomes j e – note that j e is also a possible broken form for former æ (see a below)
bet, bell) becomes e, which also absorbs former nasal ɪ (
him, pen, bring)
bed)
void) becomes w e
bounce, brown) becomes the disyllable a o
bout) becomes a w
pint, brine) becomes the disyllable a e
bite) becomes a j
proud, pride) becomes a a
bat, ban) becomes a, except after k or ɡ (
cap) when it becomes j a
bad) becomes j a, except after k or ɡ (
cab) when it becomes j e
paw, bot, bar, ball, bomb) is unchanged
bod) becomes ɑ a
beta) merges with unstressed ɑ
but, bun) becomes plain ɜ
bud) becomes ɜ a
blow, boat, bore, bone) is unchanged
bode) becomes w o
coin) becomes the disyllable o e
quoit) becomes o j
blue, pool, boon) becomes plain ʉ
boot) becomes ʉ w
food) becomes w ʉ
put) becomes ʉ
good) becomes ʉ a
pert, fur, wolf, full) become ʉr, ʉl – or r̩r, l̩l where followed by a vowel (
furry, fully)
bird, bulls) are unchanged
Contrary to the impression you'd get from a detailed account of the chaos the spelling system goes through early in this stage, the Classical period happens to be one of relative stability in the development of the language as a whole, and one that Late American speakers continue to regard as a formal standard.
millenniumshifts from ma ˈlen jam to ˈma lan jam.
thigh,
thy), long gone in related dialects, finally vanish in American, merging with t and d respectively.
inch: ɛnʒ). The “shibilants” ʃ and ʒ also undergo a phonetic shift towards ɕ, ʑ (technically, dorsal palatals, like Mandarin Chinese
sh).
bang, formerly beŋ, is now interpreted as ending in a nasalising n which has assimilated in place of articulation to an otherwise silent ɡ – bɛnɡ, pronounced bæ̃ŋ.
aptbecomes ap); but between vowels, pt or kt become tt.
beerhas become biɦ while the equivalent Brazilian import is bir.
bud) becomes baɦad and subsequently baɦd.
The language represented by the examples in the final section. By this point the Great Wheel of Morphology has come round from a thoroughly analytic to an increasingly agglutinative grammar, but there isn't room here to cover the complexities of Late American verb declensions.
r” sound.
beanand
beamis lost. It was already blurred, since both are pronounced in isolation as bẽ, but when the word is immediately followed by a syllabic sound as in
beam of light, which used to revive the final nasal consonant, it now always inserts the same one – thus bẽnəlɛd.
sing) is still pronounced sæ̃ŋ, not sæ̃n.
The examples given below are selected largely on the basis of semantic stability; there's no point using a word like “computer”, which means different things from century to century. It also simplifies things to start with nouns, which have no confusingly mutable inflected forms. The spellings used are the closest transliteration I can manage within the limitations of a twenty‐first‐century characterset; fortunately by the thirty‐first century storing information as strings of written words is something of a fossil handicraft anyway (much like calligraphy in the present day), so an “anachronistic” font is as good as any.
If you're wondering about the leading asterisks, those are a
slightly warped application of the convention used for “real”
reconstructed languages like Proto‐Indo‐European, where the star
in front of *oinom
is a warning that it's an unattested
“best guess” at the PIE for “one” arrived at by deducing the
sound‐change rules that separate it from modern languages.
American language › *myeghan lengvaj
George Washington › *Jwohj‐wᴀjandan
Abraham Lincoln › *Yebraham‐lengan
William Shakespeare › *Wiyam‐xexbih
red, white, blue › *read, *wed, *blu
one, two, three, four, five › *wan, *tu, *tri, *foh, *faav
six, seven, eight, nine, ten › *sis, *seavam, *ed, *naen, *ten
California, Texas › *Kyafwonyᴀ, *Tesas
Mercury, Venus › *Muhgyurri, *Vinas
Earth, Mars › *Uhd, *Mᴀahz
Jupiter, Saturn › *Jubwatuh, *Sarun
Uranus, Neptune › *Yurranas, *Nettun
The rough pronunciation guides above have deliberately not been made too simple – that would risk leaving readers with the impression that Futurese was just a lazy, garbled version of Presentdayese. In particular those umlauts should serve to remind readers that our successors will have different ideas about what sounds are “basic” and “easy”, and which are “subtle” and “exotic”.
2016 POSTSCRIPT: thanks to A. Z. Foreman for articulating, recording, and publishing some fantastic audio file versions of the above!
And finally: to give an impression of how much else has been going on besides regular sound‐changes, here's a Late American rendition of the Colloquy of Ælfric (as seen previously), followed by a word‐by‐word analysis. 3000 AD American has metamorphosed into something that is clearly a new language, yet recognisably a descendant of English – sentences even have a familiar stress‐timed rhythm.
Mind you, if you've been skipping over the phonetics and only
looking at the spellings, you'll get an exaggerated impression of
the differences between 2000 AD and 3000 AD, since our
present‐day standard orthography is basically mock‐Chaucerian (for
instance, we still write knight
the way they used to say
it: as nit
with extra consonants). As a
counterbalance to this, instead of repeating my
sample text's 2000 AD version spelled as if
it was Middle English, I'll do things the other way round and
write it according to Classical American conventions here:
2000 AD: | Wi txìldran beg yu, titxar, đat yu xùd titx as tu spik karektli, bikaz wi ar ìgnarant and wi spik karàptli… |
---|---|
3000 AD: | *Zᴀ kiad w’‐exùn ya tijuh, da ya‐gᴀr’‐eduketan zᴀ da wa‐tᴀgan lidla, kaz ’ban iagnaran an wa‐tᴀg kurrap… |
*zᴀ, pronounced “zaw”
*yᴀ,
*dᴀ.
*kiad, pronounced “KKHEE‐ud”
*w’‐exùn, pronounced “weSHÖ(NG)”
*ya, pronounced “yuh”
*tijuh, pronounced “TEEZH‐ögh”
*da, pronounced “duh”
*ya‐gᴀr’‐eduketan, pronounced “yagaw‐RED‐üket'n”
*wa‐tᴀgan, pronounced “wuh‐TSAWG'n”
*lidla, pronounced “LEEDla”
*kaz, pronounced “kkhuzz”
*’ban, pronounced “bnn” (unstressed)
*iagnaran, pronounced “EEugnurr'n”
*an, (still) pronounced “'n”
*wa‐tᴀg, pronounced “wuh‐TSAWG”
*kurrap, pronounced “KKHÜRrrup”