The english language will become limited to a handful of words, devoid of meaning or creativity. The capacity for individual thought will evaporate without enough words to put those thoughts into action.
...do you have any theory to back that up? Because the English vocabulary has been increasing steadily since the 12th century. We actually have the largest vocabulary of any spoken language on earth, with 300,000 words with 1,500,000 individual meanings. And if you haven't noticed we're adding more of them all the time. The Oxford English Dictionary (3rd ed.) has been knocked back to 2024 to try to deal with it
Jack's right @Dagolas, I don't think you've typed 'enough words to put those thoughts into action'. It's coming across like you're being mysterious and divine and you know some facts about the future us mortals are not party to.
I often find overly pessimistic people to make predictions just as well as overly optimistic people. There isn't much of a difference in stating "we will have no language" and "we will all speak telepathically ala the Borg and bring world peace", in the sense that both aren't based in any way whatsoever on modern or even predicted future aspects of our world and culture. The only difference is, the pessimistic one usually goes out of their way to insult the intelligence of their fellow man for the sake of sounding (pseudo) intellectual. Doesn't earn them any favors. All in all, I think, to make a good prediction, you need statistics. Don't make a biased point of view based off a few bad examples of society. Be unbiased, vigilant, and a historian. Just because the youth is naive doesn't mean they're going to grow up naive, in fact they're only naive because they're the youth. And just because one group is the loudest doesn't mean they're the most prevalent. In fact, there's an old wise saying: "It's better to be silent and thought a fool then to speak and prove it."
Every single prediction Orwell made in 1984 has become true in some way or another, in one country or another. That is, except Newspeak, which is what I refer to. What stops it from happening? As I mentioned, we already see it in SMS.
"SMS" has been around for over 170 years with not detrimental effect on spoken vocabulary. If anything it's expanded it, because people use their online terms in speech now. What "stops" the decay of language is the use of language. You're not convincing anyone.
There is also the fact that language is not an invention. Well, written language is, but not spoken language. Spoken language is a feature of anatomically modern sapiens (AMS) and is as much an ingrained thing as the number of phalanges we possess under normal circumstances, and having a liver and lungs. Humans are the animals that talk. And, as I'm sure your research has already shown you, there are only so many grammatical and syntactic schemes for the way a language can function for normal discourse and use. The idea that language will degrade into uselessness (and I know it was someone else who postulated this, not you, Jack) is the product of a lack of understanding of how language works, and its function at the individual level as well as the gestalt level. It is the nature and trajectory of culture to accumulate and grow larger, not smaller, and its vehicle is language.
Appreciate all the replies, wasn't expecting so many. I'll pick up the book 'Cloud Atlas'. Thing is I want the MC experience a culture shock, as how I am living in Italy. For how the MC speaks, his accent, and how he talks to other characters in the future catches other people attention. The character living in a whole different time period than the present time. I'm planning on keeping it simple, that technology has changed how we communicate. I not only want to show the reader how much English has changed verbally how characters speak but visualizing it on Billboards,Ads, propaganda etc. I was thinking more of the lines of words like someone mentioned Night be spelled as nite. Italians spell Phone has Fone for example. Also another problem I might face is I don't want the readers think I'm having spelling errors verses speaking differently. People have mentioned having technology replacing how we interact with each other. It's not matter of belief it has, we're living in a age where the internet has revolutionized everything. The setting in my book is a dsytopia society, oppressive government that have taken control over the internet. Censoring almost everything that isn't related to their agenda. Which forced people to fall back to old school ways. Even though people still use the internet, cell phones just not as much because of the government involvement.
This is right, @Dagolas, text speak is inventing more words faster than most people can even keep up with. Just since 2000 we've seen new words and changes in definition like 'Twerk', 'Selfie', 'Vegazle', the word 'Google' has become a verb, the word 'meme' has gone from a word in Evolutionary Biology coined by Richard Dawkins to a piece of internet nomenclature, 'fewfag', 'newbe', 'noob', 'Otherkin', 'Cisgender', and so on and so forth. You seem to have all your ideas on the development of language from Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel that, even from just this thread, it's clear you don't understand. Honestly, I wouldn't like to speculate on how English will develop, but if I can be allowed one guess, I think more Asian and specifically Chinese words will enter common English usage, along with internet speak. The lingua franca is usually the language spoken by the most commercially powerful nation, and China's economy is on fire!
Well telegram operators have been using text speak pretty much since the invention of the device. The issue with Chinese words is that we have no way to spell them, though that hasn't really stopped English in the past.
Does anyone have any other suggestions what I can do to somewhat change the English language in a scifi setting. Even how words can be compounded to be shorter.
