Future World Languages

[eschaton]

Point taken about Chinese. It's very hard to learn as a westerner, as indo-european languages don't use tones in the same way as Chinese. However, English is a terribly hard language to learn, especially to read, as the vocabulary is gigantic and essentially none of the words are pronounced anything like they are spelled.

 

[Leo Caesius]

When considering whether a language will contribute vocabulary to another language, you have to consider two important factors:

• Prestige - A language is considered 'prestigious' for whatever reason (association with a religion such as Islam or a dominant social class such as the Norman French)
• Loanwords - Words associated with a certain culture which enter a language through contact (particularly of trade goods technology not possessed by one of the two cultures).

People don't simply pick up vocabulary for no reason. They do it because they think it makes them sound high class or smart (hence prestige) or because they don't possess their own word corresponding to the concept expressed by the loanword in their own language (loanword illustrates this phenomenon quite nicely, being a calque - loan translation - of the German lehnwort). Most of the Spanish loans into English come from culinary concepts (such as foods) and other things not originally found in English-speaking society (sombreros, adobe, that kind of thing). I think that English has pretty much absorbed all the Spanish it needs, unless of course the people of Latin America develop some new technology or define new cultural concepts not already defined in the Anglophone world. Try taking a look at loanwords into English and you'll see what I'm talking about. Greek loanwords are largely restricted to scientific vocabulary. Hebrew loanwords are largely relegated to the religious sphere. There's a lot of French and Latin in legalese and government bureaucratic jargon. Yet the basic vocabulary (numbers, members of the family, household objects, domestic animals) remains the same.

If the Spanish were to somehow conquer America, and Spanish were to become the language of prestige, such that high-class Americans were to adopt Spanish for the sake of social mobility, then the situation would be different.

 

[Othniel]

At least in the Southwest united states, as well as Los Angles, and even into Mexico I can imagine English and Spainish blending at a somewhat desent rate. Also Mixed langues, such as Creole will start to become more and more like the dominate langue.

 

[Straha]

American english probably diverges from nonamerican english by a large degree by then. It would be somewhere between OTL's american english and mexican spanish.

 

[Leo Caesius]

At least in the Southwest united states, as well as Los Angles, and even into Mexico I can imagine English and Spainish blending at a somewhat desent rate. Also Mixed langues, such as Creole will start to become more and more like the dominate langue.

But creoles generally die out whenever literacy starts to rise. Look at Singlish in Singapore - it becomes more and more like standard English every day.

Mixed languages and creoles only arise in situations where the two groups meet on a completely equal basis, where neither language is more prestigious than the other (Russian and Norse traders in the Arctic speaking "Russenorsk," a pidgin blend of both languages) or people from a variety of backgrounds are suddenly brought together with no common tongue (e.g. the slave trade, which produced a number of pidgin and creole languages). The phenomenon known as Spanglish, for example, is not really a true creole but represents a phenomenon known as "code switching" which is especially common among bilingual or trilingual populations.

 

[Straha]

Leo that may be the case but the creoles would have some effects on the 2 languages that were mixed..

 

[Leo Caesius]

Leo that may be the case but the creoles would have some effects on the 2 languages that were mixed..

Crosslinguistically, that is very rare. Creoles are almost never "prestigious" and considering that their entire vocabulary is derived from one or the other language, they don't have very many new cultural concepts to introduce. Now I'll grant you that in an environment where language mixing is occuring - say, a Russian and Norwegian trading pidgin - you will also have loanwords as well - say, the Russians buy lutefisk from the Norwegians. Rather than give it a new Russian name, they'll call it lutefisk. But this will all occur independently of creoles.

Creoles are rarely stable. They have a way of showing up, surviving for a few generations, and then disappearing. Most of them have disappeared already. The only places where they survive are generally places with very low literacy rates and no access to education in a standard language.

 

[Othniel]

I was talking about thoose areas in the Oaxaca region for example. Spainsh mixing with native words is going to eventually be weened out, however right now litercy isn't going to tend to rise. Maybe one day even the Mexician dilect will spread to Spain, and prehaps not. I'm going to say the mixing and devolpment of slang and dilect will ultimately ween out what is normally prestigious.

 

[Midgard]

Crosslinguistically, that is very rare. Creoles are almost never "prestigious" and considering that their entire vocabulary is derived from one or the other language, they don't have very many new cultural concepts to introduce. Now I'll grant you that in an environment where language mixing is occuring - say, a Russian and Norwegian trading pidgin - you will also have loanwords as well - say, the Russians buy lutefisk from the Norwegians. Rather than give it a new Russian name, they'll call it lutefisk. But this will all occur independently of creoles.

Creoles are rarely stable. They have a way of showing up, surviving for a few generations, and then disappearing. Most of them have disappeared already. The only places where they survive are generally places with very low literacy rates and no access to education in a standard language.

Counterpoint: "creole" language could survive, thrive, and even infiltrate mainstream through the means of the popular culture. Case in the point: the popularity of rap in the United States. The actual "lingo" used in rap seems to fall under the definition of the "creole" language, and is seen as "cool" by the people not even using the dialect under other circumstances. Popular music, movies, and whatnot made to cater to the subculture using the dialect/lingo also serves to preserve it - again, in the US, Spanish language television channels, radio stations, etc, that effectively create a community that has little need for English other than for marginal interaction, and that is sufficiently large and economically powerful for the non-Spanish speaking community and businesses to want to reach out to them, be it for political, or economic reasons (think large billboard announcements and advertisements in Spanish here in Denver, or other cities).

 

[Leo Caesius]

Counterpoint: "creole" language could survive, thrive, and even infiltrate mainstream through the means of the popular culture. Case in the point: the popularity of rap in the United States. The actual "lingo" used in rap seems to fall under the definition of the "creole" language, and is seen as "cool" by the people not even using the dialect under other circumstances.

That's a different phenomenon, and would fall under my point about prestige anyway.

The lingo used in rap is more commonly known as "Black Vernacular English" or BVE. While it manifests some of the traits of a creole (reduced grammar being one of them) it is not a creole by definition. Linguists tend to refer to BVE as a nonstandard dialect of English.

I'm beginning to sense that we may have a difference of opinion on what constitutes a creole, and so I think I should at least let you know which operating definitions I'm using.

Language contact covers a whole host of sins, from "foreigner talk" (which is what monolingual Americans do to their English whenever they travel abroad), code switching, pidgins, creoles, jargons, etc.

A pidgin is a mixed language whose grammar cannot be derived from any source language. That is, it resembles a source language superficially (with the same vocabulary) but has its own grammar. This is the most important diagnostic feature of a pidgin. Another important diagnostic feature is that, by definition, nobody speaks a pidgin as their native language - it is only used in contact situations.

A creole is a pidgin that has become someone's native language. Let's say our hypothetical Norwegian merchant (who speaks no Russian) orders a Russian bride (who speaks no Norsk), with whom he converses in Russenorsk. Now, if they have children, it's entirely possible that the child may grow up speaking Russenorsk, in which case we would say that Russenorsk has undergone creolization. Children's minds do interesting things to language - tending to regularize paradigms etc so the Russenorsk Creole would be structurally different from Russenorsk Pidgin.

There is also a whole host of phenomena that fall under the rubric of slang, jargons, technical language, cants, etc. These may be unintelligible to someone outside of the community that uses them (be they tech geeks, Miami Cubans, or gangster rappers) but that doesn't mean that they are creoles. The difference here lies in vocabulary - which is notoriously mutable - not grammar - which remains fairly constant from generation to generation.

Now, mind you, these are the technical definitions for these phenomena, and I realize that people tend to describe provincial dialects of a language (such as Black Vernacular English or French patois) as creoles or pidgin languages. My main point is that, from a technical standpoint, what you're talking about belongs more to the category of slangs, cants, and jargons than pidgin and creole languages - the latter being much more uncommon. Even if some kind of mixed Spanish - English creole were to arise (and I know of no such creole, at least not in the US), and this Spanglish creole were to become faddish such that words from it were adopted into the dominant idiom (in this case, English or Spanish), it would involve only a small contribution to the vocabulary of each language and absolutely no affect on the grammatical structure of either language.

 

[Adamanteus]

I'm writing about a 23rd-century future. In this future, most of the major languages today exist, but there are some attempts to make several regional "standardized" tongues. Here's my meger attempt to start on them:

World Mandarin
Standard English (many Spanish words included)
Hindi
Arabic
EuroEsperanto
Russian
Japanese/Korean?
Swahili/Hausa

Suggestions?

I've always been skeptical of artificial languages. The reason is that natural languages arise so much more easily, and are taken to so much more rapidly than artificial languages. There have been studies of pidgin languages, and how fast they appear. It turns out you only need a couple of generations before the language is fully fledged and widely spoken. Given this evidence, I suspect that while there may be a lingua franca in the future (possibly English, as that seems to be the way things are going these days), it won't be an artificial one.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

A pidgin is a mixed language whose grammar cannot be derived from any source language. That is, it resembles a source language superficially (with the same vocabulary) but has its own grammar. This is the most important diagnostic feature of a pidgin. Another important diagnostic feature is that, by definition, nobody speaks a pidgin as their native language - it is only used in contact situations.

I had understood that pidgin tongues generally don't have grammatical structures at all, until children are exposed to them and turn them into creole.

 

[Jesse]

Here's a cool page on how english might change over the next thousand years, given what we know about how languages have changed in the past:

FUTURESE: The American Language in 3000 AD

At the beginning, he points out how much our language has changed since 1000 AD:

For comparison, the English spoken at the turn of the last millennium looked like this:
1000 AD: Wé cildra biddafi fié, éalá láréow, fiæt fiú tæ'ce ús sprecan rihte, forfiám ungelæ'rede wé sindon, and gewæmmodlíce we sprecafi...
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 Aelfric.) 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.

Then at the end, he imagines how the same sentence might look in 3000 AD english:

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 Aelfric (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.
2000 AD: We children beg you, teacher, that you should teach us to speak correctly, because we are ignorant and we speak corruptly...
3000 AD: *ZA kiad w'-exùn ya tijuh, da ya-gAr'-eduketan zA da wa-tAgan lidla, kaz 'ban iagnaran an wa-tAg kurrap...

*zA, pronounced "zaw"
"Us-all", analogous in form to the second- and third-person *yA, *dA.
*kiad, pronounced "KKHEE-ud"
"Kid", obviously enough.
*w'-exùn, pronounced "weSHÖ(NG)"
Pronominal prefix ("we") and finite verb-stem; a twenty-fifth century slang term, origin unclear.
*ya, pronounced "yuh"
"You", singular.
*tijuh, pronounced "TEEZH-ögh"
From "teacher", now restricted to meaning specifically a language-instructor.
*da, pronounced "duh"
"That", as a subordinating conjunction.
*ya-gAr'-eduketan, pronounced "yagaw-RED-üket'n"
Pronominal prefix, auxiliary prefix (from "gotta") and nonfinite verb ("educate" - note the preserved form).
*wa-tAgan, pronounced "wuh-TSAWG'n"
"Talk"; pronominal prefix and nonfinite verb.
*lidla, pronounced "LEEDla"
A back-loan from Central Hindi, where English "legal" developed the specialised sense "linguistically well-formed".
*kaz, pronounced "kkhuzz"
Conjunction, "because".
*'ban, pronounced "bnn" (unstressed)
Irregular particle derived from the verb "be".
*iagnaran, pronounced "EEugnurr'n"
Regularly derived from "ignorant".
*an, (still) pronounced "'n"
The coordinating conjunction "and".
*wa-tAg, pronounced "wuh-TSAWG"
As in the previous clause, but this time in the positive-indicative form.
*kurrap, pronounced "KKHÜRrrup"
Regularly derived from "corrupt".

 

[Wendell]

That certainly is interesting. The 3000 sample looks very little like either other English.

 

[Nicole]

But don't alot of the changes from Anglo-Saxon to English come from the long period in which Norman French was the prestige language of England?

 

[Wendell]

But don't alot of the changes from Anglo-Saxon to English come from the long period in which Norman French was the prestige language of England?

Yes, that is correct.

 

[Leo Caesius]

I had understood that pidgin tongues generally don't have grammatical structures at all, until children are exposed to them and turn them into creole.

There is a grammar, albeit a reduced one. Remarkably, all attested pidgins follow a highly analytical grammar (as opposed to synthetic, like Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit, or agglutinative, like Turkish). While there aren't many inflections (which may be what you mean by grammatical structures), the syntax and the vocabulary provide much of the meaning. In this sense most pidgins resemble Mandarin Chinese more than any other natural language.

Much ink has been spilled on this. Keith Whinnom first suggested that the extant pidgins derive largely from the Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean, which traveled around the world courtesy of the slave trade. The Spanish and Portuguese were in charge of this trade, and so the original pidgin was vaguely Iberian. When the slaves were traded to, say, the British or the French, the language they spoke became relexified to incorporate new English or French words. That explains why many of the pidgins and creoles today seem to have a stratum of Portuguese or Spanish vocabulary, no matter where they are.

This obviously does not apply to things like Russenorsk, the Chinook Jargon, the Russo-Manchurian Pidgin, or Juba Arabic, which have no influence from either Spanish or Portuguese. It does, however, explain a lot of peculiarities about the other pidgins.

 

[carlton_bach]

Wouldn't the simplest explanation for pidgins having analytical grammar be that analytical grammarts can be applied to words of different origins regardless of their phonetic structure? Inflections often rely on words conforming to a given pattern (verbs roots taking on a vowel ending, frex, or male and female nouns taking different final vowel sounds). If you are putting together a lexicon from sources in various languages, the entries may not conform to those patterns. Thus, an analytical grammar will be easier to use. Not to mention it being easier on the communication in an environment with a relatively low level of standardisation. Inflectional moprhemes, by nature similar, can muddle things up for a hearer - just look at the way chlidren mimic 'foreign' sounds. What comes out clearest are case/gender/number/tense markers and articles.

It has been suggested English is so successful at plunder... adopting other languages' words because of its strong analytical bent. In English, anything can be a verb.

 

[Leo Caesius]

Wouldn't the simplest explanation for pidgins having analytical grammar be that analytical grammarts can be applied to words of different origins regardless of their phonetic structure?

Absolutely - but that doesn't explain the Portuguese/Spanish substrate found in most extant creoles (be they Spanish, French, or even English). While Whinnom's theory of monogenesis is still controversial (largely because of the examples that I cited, which could have nothing to do with the Lingua Franca or any of its offshoots), his theory of relexification (that is, that pidgins and creoles tend to pick up and abandon vocabulary as they come into contact with other languages, and at a greater rate than other languages) is well documented and widely accepted.

 

[Raymann]

just look at the way chlidren mimic 'foreign' sounds

Unless its polish, for the life of me I cannot pronounce words in that language.

What a lot of people disregard about the future evolution is the present nature of our technological society. There are no breaks in education from one generation to another. Basic vocabulary hasn't really changed much since Webster put out his book, why, cause thats where we learn it all from. Sure we use slang but we know formal speech just as well. Case in point: look at rappers like P. Diddy who can speak perfectly good English in a more formal setting.

As for loan words, obviously that won't stop. Booker T. Washington once said

"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

But that's just it, NEW vocabulary, not replace ones we already have. This whole Spanglish thing is limited to 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, they either speak English or Spanish first. Most new words entering into our vocabulary now will be technological, not verbs or adjectives, just nouns.