YOUR language in the next 1000 years

[Levike]

According to your imagination how will YOUR language look like in the year 3013 ???

How will it sound?
How will it be written?
What status will it have?
Or anything else.

Please talk about the future of the language that YOU currently study.

[Achmedino]

I think just about any language will get closer to english (or whatever the lingua franca will be in a couple of years), as globalization continues. I think more loan words will be used and the youth will use more english (since it's considered to be kinda cool over here.).

[morlader]

By that time everyone will probably be speaking one language. There's no idea which one it'll be most based on, since it's impossible to predict the rise and fall of economic, cultural and military powers over the next 1,000 years.

I'd like to think it's possible to keep all languages alive, and future translation technology will certainly help prolong many languages' lives, but the grim reality is that communication will outweigh sentiment. This we can see in the disappearance of dialects and regional accents as individual countries become economically and culturally unified. As globalisation progresses it'll happen internationally too. It's a pity but there's nothing we can do, except protect and preserve as much as we can now so that the knowledge isn't lost in the future, and focus on the still-relevant needs of language speakers in the present day.

[Levike]

I really doubt that everybody will speak the same language.
Maybe minority languages will disappear.

I say that those languages which are official somewhere will continue to live on.
For example I don't see Russia or France adopting a new language.

I think that we will have more lingua francas at the same time.
Every major language with its own influence zone.

[linguoboy]

I think just about any language will get closer to english (or whatever the lingua franca will be in a couple of years), as globalization continues. I think more loan words will be used and the youth will use more english (since it's considered to be kinda cool over here.).

It's a fair bet that languages will continue to borrow from the language of prestige, whatever that is. If it ceases to be English, however, then it's quite likely that many of the English borrowings present in many of the world's languages will come to be seen as old fashioned and fall out of use, to be replaced by borrowings from the next prestige language. In the West, we've seen this happen already with French and with Latin before that. Japanese went through a couple other European languages (Protuguese, Dutch, German) before settling on English and now only very few relics of those remain.

I really doubt that everybody will speak the same language.

So do I. At the very least, it's doubtful that English will remain unified, given the divergences now in progress. It used to be thought that mass media and globalisation would spell the doom of dialectal differences, but different varieties of American English are developing in incompatible directions.

Language serves many other purposes besides intercommunication. It's a major component of personal identity, and people will always feel a need to distinguish themselves from other groups of people. Moreover, as translation utilities become more and more sophisticated, the need for every person to be multilingual decreases.

[morlader]

Certain languages will certainly cling on longer than others. But 1,000 years is a very long time. Who says Russia and France, as we presently know them, will still exist in 3013?

Being an official language of a country is no guarantee that a language will see continuous use in that area. Look at the smaller European countries which are switching to English for university education. Look at the city councils which offer local government services in immigrant languages. Look at the monopoly of English in science.

The smaller languages will find the amount of uses they have becoming smaller and smaller. Sooner or later it'll happen to the larger languages too. Instant translation technology, once it's perfected, may go some way to slowing the process, as the need to learn languages for communication disappears. But as culture becomes globalised, and as people move around, marry, and pass languages on to their kids, the languages seen as less useful (whatever they may be) will be dropped. I'm not saying this will happen in the next century, or even in the next few centuries, but like I said, 1,000 years is a very long time.

[morlader]

Language serves many other purposes besides intercommunication. It's a major component of personal identity, and people will always feel a need to distinguish themselves from other groups of people. Moreover, as translation utilities become more and more sophisticated, the need for every person to be multilingual decreases.

But will nationalism still exist in 1,000 years? It's a relatively recent concept that is likely to rise and fall with time.

There are other ways of expressing personal identity besides language. Look at English, we can still be British, American, Canadian, Australian, Irish and New Zealander and all speak the same language. Admittedly these nationalities mostly come from a common background, but even in the UK, most Cornishmen, Welshmen, Scotsmen and Irishmen are quite content with their identity while also being quite content with speaking English. And in the US, many Americans who profess Polish/Italian/Chinese ancestry etc are content with their identity without speaking their ancestral language.

[linguoboy]

But will nationalism still exist in 1,000 years?

Who was talking about nationalism? Any community of speakers we've ever studied shows linguistic variation along social vectors. Language is a universal means of demonstrating your participation in certain communities as well as your status and group or subgroup identification. Why would we expect that to change suddenly?

There are other ways of expressing personal identity besides language. Look at English, we can still be British, American, Canadian, Australian, Irish and New Zealander and all speak the same language.

That's debatable. There are dialects of all the above national varieties of English which are not fully intelligible to native speakers of American English. (And by this I don't mean the occasional puzzling word or idiom; I mean that often they cannot even get the gist of an exchange.) And these dialects are not retreating. Look at Estuary English; it is less intelligible to most USAmericans than the previous RP-based standard, yet its features are spreading rapidly throughout Britain.

In this country, we have active vowel chain shifts such as the Northern Cities shift, the Southern Cities shift, and the Northern California shift. Note how on many axes they are moving in opposing directions. For instance, the NCVS shifts /a/ to [æ] whereas the California shift moves /æ/ to [a]! This is the exact opposite of what the convergence model which you are proposing would predict.

[linguoboy]

Being an official language of a country is no guarantee that a language will see continuous use in that area. Look at the smaller European countries which are switching to English for university education. Look at the city councils which offer local government services in immigrant languages. Look at the monopoly of English in science.

All interesting observations, to be sure, but they don't add up to corroboration of your thesis. Surely the necessity of offering government services in multiple languages is a concession to the fact that linguistic globalisation still hasn't advanced very far. Foreign language universities are hardly a new concept; Czech didn't become the language of the Charles University in Prague until the late 19th century, more than 500 years after it was founded. Before English was the language of science, German was, and Latin before that. What percentage of the population is engaged in scientific professions anyway? Certainly nowhere near a majority.

Where is the evidence that citizens of these smaller countries are making the conscious decision to raise their children to speak only English rather than the national language? Until you can show proof of that, you don't have evidence of an incipient language shift. You seem to believe that stable bilingualism is an impossibility. Why?

[johntm]

The world (universe) will speak English, as Futurama says, or the Esperantists will have their way.

[Levike]

Please stay on topic ! ! !

Talk about the future of that language that you're studying

and not about what will be the next lingua franca.

[linguoboy]

Talk about the future of that language that you're studying

and not about what will be the next lingua franca.

I think one is a prerequisite for the other. Whether or not English continues to be a global lingua franca will have a tremendous impact on its nature and status.

[Lur]

I think most languages are going to be destroyed. Maybe the cultural and technological environment afterwards might make it easier to get just some our global linguistic heritage back. What's interesting is that this kind of stuff would seemingly also be paired with some climaxes on enviromental damage on Earth so I really wonder what people of the future will think of our whole situation. It's sad.

I also think that some automatic translation technology like it's been mentioned could stop processes of bilingualism first and language extinction later.

Personally, these days I've started to feel tired at the omnipresence of English, or Castilian, or any of these.

[Yasna]

It will be fascinating to see what the linguistic implications will be once we colonize the rest of our solar system. What languages will be spoken in other parts of the system and how will those languages evolve and interact with Earth languages?

[Lur]

It will be fascinating to see what the linguistic implications will be once we colonize the rest of our solar system. What languages will be spoken in other parts of the system and how will those languages evolve and interact with Earth languages?

I have been thinking on this a lot and I can't get to conclusions. I'm writing science fiction stories set in a colonized solar system (although most of humanity lives in the inner solar system anyway for energetic reasons), and I can't decide what languages are the character's mother tongues and what they're supposed to be speaking. And I don't want to go to the obvious with strong majority languages of today.

The only thing I decided is that there wasn't a strong defined lingua franca and that many small languages had been readopted and expanded. But I don't know what else to do. I've thought, that since in-universe people have an indefinite lifespan and has been like this for a while, language evolution would be really slow, but I'm not even sure about that. I think that if people live in small orbital worlds in the inner solar system, each one could have might develop its own linguistic community from a particular language, while others might be multilinguistic and mixed, specially in the outer solar system. But that's just my imagination.

[Yasna]

I have been thinking on this a lot and I can't get to conclusions. I'm writing science fiction stories set in a colonized solar system (although most of humanity lives in the inner solar system anyway for energetic reasons), and I can't decide what languages are the character's mother tongues and what they're supposed to be speaking. And I don't want to go to the obvious with strong majority languages of today.

The only thing I decided is that there wasn't a strong defined lingua franca and that many small languages had been readopted and expanded. But I don't know what else to do. I've thought, that since in-universe people have an indefinite lifespan and has been like this for a while, language evolution would be really slow, but I'm not even sure about that. I think that if people live in small orbital worlds in the inner solar system, each one could have might develop its own linguistic community from a particular language, while others might be multilinguistic and mixed, specially in the outer solar system. But that's just my imagination.

It depends a lot on how the colonization unfolds. If the colonies are populated mostly by international crews of scientists and engineers, then English would be the obvious language. However if interplanetary travel became cheap and large-scale interplanetary immigration was realized, then all bets are off.

[Lur]

Mmh. In the universe I write lots of people live regularly in space and more keep coming, because each little colony has unlimited free energy from the Sun and can offer each inhabitant more space that they could even buy on Earth. The life in the inner world of many colonies is actually calm rural in the inside and industrial on the outside. Many people live in a self-sufficient manner. This is why I want to drop the English only angle (also because it'd be fucking boring), but I have a hard time choosing languages. Some of the languages I fancy to put in there are Persian, Quechua, Galician, Thai, and Indonesian. The main character can actually speak ancient Greek fluently.

What would you say is the future of Persian?

[Cycol]

I want to write a sci-fi novel set something in 3000 AD.
So I have been pondering for some time about what language they might speak.

I came across a term called 'glottochronology', a science investigating how long ago some language split from each other.

You may look it up.

[Limagne]

What would you say is the future of Persian?

We don't even know what the Persian-speaking territories will look like in 5 years Predicting the future of the language is a tall order.

[johnklepac]

I'm not feeling optimistic about Czech's future status.