YOUR language in the next 1000 years

[Kenny]

I have no idea what he means by that
I've never met anyone who pronounced [ʃ] anything other than that, apart from people with a lisp maybe.

[Levo]

Oh yeah,
and our s (sh) is becoming soft :S which sounds awful, and about 20 years ago was still funny, but today many people pronounce it a bit softer than how I remembered in my childhood, and such people who have no pronounciational disorder

Maybe our r is softening too a little bit? i'm not sure (towards standard-Swedish like, but not close to that yet).

What do you mean by "softening"? Do you happen to know IPA?

Yesterday I had no time to look up IPA properly. I mean, that that kind of sh which sounded like lisping 20 years ago and most people were smiling at it, is now becoming widespread among a lot of people having no pronounciational disorder. Even on TV. Of course, not the worst stereotypical lisping, but our s [sh] became much softer. Now we don't even tell anymore with friends and family, "hey, he is having a lisp", because they are not a small minority any more.

[Dormouse559]

Do you mean that /ʃ/ is being pronounced more like [θ]? "Softening" doesn't mean much to me, particularly since languages I'm more familiar with sometimes treat /ʃ/ as a "soft" version of some other sound.

And what did you mean about /r/?

[Kenny]

Oh yeah,
and our s (sh) is becoming soft :S which sounds awful, and about 20 years ago was still funny, but today many people pronounce it a bit softer than how I remembered in my childhood, and such people who have no pronounciational disorder

Maybe our r is softening too a little bit? i'm not sure (towards standard-Swedish like, but not close to that yet).

What do you mean by "softening"? Do you happen to know IPA?

Yesterday I had no time to look up IPA properly. I mean, that that kind of sh which sounded like lisping 20 years ago and most people were smiling at it, is now becoming widespread among a lot of people having no pronounciational disorder. Even on TV. Of course, not the worst stereotypical lisping, but our s [sh] became much softer. Now we don't even tell anymore with friends and family, "hey, he is having a lisp", because they are not a small minority any more.

Could you cite someone on TV who speaks like that? I'm still not sure what you mean and can't think of any friend or acquaintance who prounces their /ʃ/'s that way.

[TaylorS]

English will diverge into several languages, I see 4 emerging in North America: Northern, Southern, Western, and Canadian.

We here in the Upper Midwest would be part of the western dialect the Northern language that has the cot-caught merger.

Some changes I see happening are:

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PHONOLOGY:

Elision of intervocalic /t d nt nd/ into a hiatus between vowels, with /nt nd/ leaving nasalized vowels.

Elision of /n/ when followed by a fricative, nasalizing the preceding vowel.

/θ ð/ merging with /d/.

lengthening and then in some cases breaking of vowels when followed by /b d dʒ g/, so "died", /daid/, becomes something like /dajɛd/. "Kid", /kɪd/, becomes/ kejd/.

Following the vowel breaking, syllable-final /p t tS k/ merge with /b d dʒ g/.

/r/ becomes /ɣ/.

/l/ becomes /w/.

/ə/ elides in all unstressed syllables.

GRAMMAR:

Preterite and the Perfect merge.

"Like" grammaticalizes as both a quotative particle and an accusative preposition.

The Subjunctive disappears completely.

Dropping of "to be" in complex passives ("That needs fixed") and the use of positive "anymore" becomes universal.

Auxiliary verbs become increasingly reduced and encliticized to the subject

Romance-style "redundant" pronounces for verbal agreement appear. "The ball it-was rolling".

The redundant pronounce and the auxiliary verbs attach to the main verb and become prefixes.

[Johanna]

One thing I can see Swedish developing is to drop the auxiliary verb from the perfect tense completely, and then also the pluperfect one as well, making them only distinguishable by what comes next.

This is already grammatical in Modern Swedish:
Om nån gjort det kan vi kanske fortsätta?
Om nån gjort det kanske vi kunde forsätta?

'If someone has done it, maybe we can proceed?'
'If someone had done it, maybe we could proceed?'

It's the 'has'/'had' part that's left out in the Swedish versions. But you can't leave them out always yet, just in certain circumstances.

[linguoboy]

It's the 'has'/'had' part that's left out in the Swedish versions. But you can't leave them out always yet, just in certain circumstances.

Interestingly, German has moved in the opposite direction. Earlier on, it was acceptable in the standard language to leave out perfect auxiliaries in dependent clauses, e.g.:

"Wem der große Wurf gelungen,
eines Freundes Freund zu sein,
wer ein holdes Weib errungen,
mische seinen Jubel ein!"

This usage is familiar to many speakers from poetry and older literature, but I don't know any contemporary spoken varieties which retain it.

[Levike]

For Romanian I predict that it will loose all of its 5 cases:

So the dative, genitive and vocative will all disappear

now: Cartea Mariei ( the book of Mary)
future: Carte de Maria / Cartea la Maria ( book of Mary)

[johnklepac]

Scottish Gaelic is not going to fare too well. I doubt too many people in Scotland will even know about it 1,000 years from now.

English will diverge into several languages, I see 4 emerging in North America: Northern, Southern, Western, and Canadian.

Considering the already high and increasing degree of communication we have with people outside our region of the country, I'd expect the opposite.

[IpseDixit]

English will diverge into several languages, I see 4 emerging in North America: Northern, Southern, Western, and Canadian.

Considering the already high and increasing degree of communication we have with people outside our region of the country, I'd expect the opposite.

Yeah I agree. I think our global/globalized and interconnected world will keep English together, and probably the same can be said for many other widely spread languages as well. Personally I don't see any diverging process inside the English language, the fact that there are regional words and slangs and different pronunciations does not mean anything in my opinion... all languages have regional variations.

[Yasna]

Personally I don't see any diverging process inside the English language, the fact that there are regional words and slangs and different pronunciations does not mean anything in my opinion... all languages have regional variations.

There's at least one ongoing diverging process in the English language:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_cities_vowel_shift

[TaylorS]

Scottish Gaelic is not going to fare too well. I doubt too many people in Scotland will even know about it 1,000 years from now.

English will diverge into several languages, I see 4 emerging in North America: Northern, Southern, Western, and Canadian.

Considering the already high and increasing degree of communication we have with people outside our region of the country, I'd expect the opposite.

This is a popular myth, linguist Bill Labov's work on American English dialects has shown that modern mass communication has in no way slowed or stopped the divergence of dialects.

I expect English to become sort of like how Arabic is now, numerous mutually unintelligible "dialects" linked together by a formal standard based on present day English, much like how Arabs today use Modern Standard Arabic.

[linguoboy]

This is a popular myth, linguist Bill Labov's work on American English dialects has shown that modern mass communication has in no way slowed or stopped the divergence of dialects.

In fact, the distance is increasing. The NCVS is taking the mid vowels in one direction, the Southern Cities Vowel Shift in another, and the Southern California Shift in another altogether.

I think it's common to think that impediments to communication are the only factors driving linguistic divergence. But sometimes the driver is a desire to maintain a distinct identity. Labov did pioneering work on the island of Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts where he demonstrated that an influx of outsiders increased the distance between their speech and the speech of the islanders as the latter felt an increased desire to emphasise their local origin.

[Quetzalcoatl]

1000 years are way toooo long to be predictable... But I see some tendencies in German which might become accepted as Standard German in some decades:

- complete loss of the "Konjunktiv 1" ("er sei", "er habe", "er wolle") (probability: 80%)
- partial loss of the "Konjunktiv 2" (exception: auxiliary verbs and modal verbs) (80%)
- grammaticalization of "am + infinitive" to form a productive progressive aspect ("Ich bin am arbeiten.") (60%)
- fewer irregular forms in the past and perfect tense (p. almost 100%)
- [ç] > [ʃ] (50%)
- more diphthongs due to influence of English like [eɪ] and [oʊ] (30-40%)
- cliticization of pronouns following verbs (for example "biste" instead of "bist du") (60%)
- loss of V2 ("Heute ich gehe." instead of "Heute gehe ich.") (30-40%)
- dative-accusative-merger for masculine nouns ("Ich helfe den Mann." instead of "Ich helfe dem Mann.") (70%)

[mōdgethanc]

Sorry, where are you getting these numerical figures if not from out of thin air?

[Car]

- complete loss of the "Konjunktiv 1" ("er sei", "er habe", "er wolle") (probability: 80%)

That probability seems too low.

- [ç] > [ʃ] (50%)

I don't think that will become standard any time soon. In some regions, certainly, but standard?

- dative-accusative-merger for masculine nouns ("Ich helfe den Mann." instead of "Ich helfe dem Mann.") (70%)

What makes you think that?

[Gormur]

Such things as French, for some reason, were spared

In Canada? Yes and no. Any francophone outside Quebec and New Brunswick doesn't really have much access to stuff in French.

It might be in that not much category but the French quarter in Winnipeg has quite a bit, including a university. They do speak French there too. Some use a rolled r

As for a thousand years from now, I think there will be more dialects as the result of languages being broken down. Although I doubt we'll ever have anything like 49 or 50 total languages

It'll likely be diverse; similar to how it is right now. North Germanic languages will be spoken and healthy. Maybe even more people will be multilingual because getting around will be easier

I've never studied Scots Gaelic but I think it'll stay around at least for cultural purposes. Although I guess it's true, we can't prevent the death of everyday spoken exchanges which is sad to think about. I suppose there are ways around this

It seems like everyone's goal here is to have massive amounts of speakers, but that doesn't really address the issue of language death or even the health status of living languages

[linguoboy]

I've never studied Scots Gaelic but I think it'll stay around at least for cultural purposes.

If by "cultural purposes", you mean "tattoos, plus the occasional name of a house or a boat", I think we're already there.

[Gormur]

I was thinking more along the lines of festivals, street signs and literature in schools but okay

[linguoboy]

I was thinking more along the lines of festivals, street signs and literature in schools but okay

You know of schools where they teach Scottish-Gaelic literature? The only place where you really come across Scottish-Gaelic in a literary context is in songs.