In my book it starts off in the present time and five centuries from now in the future. It is a Sci-Fi theme and I made it where the English became the dominate language in society. I just need some guidance, how I can make English differ in the future and our language is constantly evolving. Also with texting on our cell phones using acronyms like lol or wrud is changing how we communicate, even with slang words. In Italy for example they say 'Ciao' for hello and goodbye as to Americans young adults often say 'Sup' or 'Later'. Will our grammar change from how we write, will it be broken down to complete words but acronyms? Would like your opion or 'two cents' a other example on the subject
Just responding to one element of your post: Texting has a high tech vibe now, but I think that's because we don't have perfect voice recognition, because text best supports intermittent conversation best, and so on. But those facts are likely to change very soon. I definitely wouldn't assume that acronyms and text-speak, which are based on limitations in the technology (you use text speak because it's faster than typing out the words), would last long.
You can now send text messages by talking to your phone which eliminates the need for typing so acronyms and shortened words will eventually disappear. The only problem with talk texting, is dialect and having a phone that doesn't always understand what you are saying.
But things like "lol" and "Sup" are not textspeak - textspeak would be something like this: Wer ru? ur l8 again! brb lmao imo tbh cu ftw fyi tmw nite ^those are textspeak. However, textspeak like "nite" could plausibly replace "night" eventually just cus it's shorter. There's also foreign textspeak: 88 is Bye bye in Chinese textspeak lol. But "Sup" is more like slang. I don't even know what "lol" stands for but it's sorta become it's own word. It's not that uncommon for people to actually say "lol" out loud. I know I've done it before on occasion. What the OP seems to be referring to is more the shift of languages - how "ciao" went from meaning only "goodbye" to now meaning both "hello" and "goodbye", or new ways of greeting like "Sup" that didn't use to exist. What the OP should be aware of is for example, there's now a phenomenon called European English - so many people speak English these days, plenty of them non-native speakers, that a whole new form of English is appearing. Even with English being the dominant language, OP should also be aware of foreign loan words. For example, "gung-ho" which is now a pretty common business term, it seems, and you certainly see it in very modern articles about businesses and technology etc, is a Cantonese loan word that now English speakers use. Think of the word "tsunami", which is distinctly a Japanese word that English speakers use universally. So I'd say when thinking of the evolution of English, you must also consider what kind of loan words English could potentially pick up in the future. (and the Japanese word "kawaii" has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary too) Going from the horrible trend of people writing "should of" instead of "should have" - and I've seen it even on this forum!! - it could be that in the future "of" would become accepted either as an alterative to "have" or else replace it altogether as the "correct" form. The usage of "further" and "farther" is already changing - most people don't bother with the difference between the two words. Since OP's writing about the future, it wouldn't be too far-fetched if there's a spelling reform either. German and Chinese both went through it. English hasn't, but that's why English spelling makes no sense. The implementation of spelling reform for English could plausibly happen. I would also look into what sort of technology's being invented now. For example, there's Google Glass, shortened to simply "Glass". Again, plausible to imagine in 50 years teenagers saying, "Hey, where's your glass?" or "Shit I left my glass at home!" There's also technology that allows you to watch videos on your phone in 3D. It's the same now. I once said, "Oh I should have brought my tablet!" And my sister and mum both reacted by saying, "Why are you taking tablets? Are you ill?" But I meant an electronic tablet. Or think, when someone asks a question, people don't say, "Look it up on the internet" usually - they say, "Why don't you google it?" Google has become a verb, as has words/tech like Photoshop. So other than the natural evolution of English, I'd look into what new words might get invented over time based on technology.
As already pointed out by @ChickenFreak, the emphasis being placed in this conversation on technological dynamics may have some small effect, but the nature of the paradigm (ever-changing technology) almost guarantees that changes from this venue will be fleeting and answer to dynamics similar to slang terms, which have a very short shelf life. These kinds of things look flashy to a speaker of a language at the moment in time in which they live, and seem like strong effectors of change, but they're only flashy, not lasting. There are two things to think about when it comes to English five centuries from now: How it will sound English is sufficiently spread across the globe that it would not be out of the question for at least one speaking region to take a strong consonant shift within the span of five centuries. This is the kind of thing that creates deep, permanent change in a language because it's not just one word here or one word there. It's the change of pronunciation of a particular phoneme almost anywhere it occurs in any word in a language. Example: Most speakers of Spanish pronounce the letter Y pretty much the way it's pronounced in English, and the LL is closer to a J in English. But in Argentina and surrounding areas, there is a consonant shift that makes the Y sound like SH and the LL sound like ZH. It lends the Spanish of Argentina a very distinct sound. In parts of the Caribbean there is a shift to completely drop most occurrences of S within words and to drop the D that comes before the vowel at the end of participles. They don't get pronounced at all. And in Puerto Rico in particular there is a shift where R gets pronounced as an L and in the west of the island, the double R gets a guttural pronunciation like the R of French instead of a prolonged trill with the tip of the tongue. Have more than one of these kinds of events happen in a language and you quickly get a broad, pervasive accumulation of differences that make the language spoken in one region difficult to understand when you are from another region. These kinds of changes are what split English and German and Dutch and Frisian; Spanish and Italian and French and Romanian. How it will look Remember that English has been extremely resistant to any kind of spelling reform. Since the invention of the printing press when standardized spelling became a thing, English has not had a single reform, where most languages have had several to make the spelling of words stay in sync with the way people pronounce them. And this is really silly in the case of English since the particular version of English that got stamped down into books turned out not to be the version of English that became popular and spread across the globe. Regardless, my point to that is that written English, if it continues with its stubborn ways, would be less representative of spoken differences five centuries from now than you would expect it to be. I mean, we still haven't fixed the -augh and -ough words to make the spelling reflect modern pronunciation, and it's been how long since the printing press? There are uncounted other things to take into account as regards how languages change. The things mentioned by others already do have some effect, accumulating word by word over time, but those things take a very long time to accumulate and since linguistic isolation is next to impossible in the modern world, the accumulation has little sticking power. But still, add them together with large shifts in pronunciation, or the inclusion of a new pronoun (y'all, yous, youz) that, who knows, maybe also brings with it an actual notable verb conjugation because it happens in an area where English is spoken alongside another language that has a complete set of verb conjugations and the habit sticks because everyone understands those conjugations. Imagine the following: You (pl.) should go to the store and buy some bread. Assume that y'all has completely replaced you as the second person plural and you get: Y'all should go to the store and buy some bread. Now add a verb conjugation that is specific to y'all and get rid of the apostrophe that's not really needed anymore. Yall shouldke go to the store and buy some bread. Now add a consonant shift that turns S into SH and SH into CH. Yall chouldke go to the shtore and buy shome bread. Now imagine that someone finally forces a fix to the ridiculous spelling that doesn't really align well with the pronunciations. Yal chudke go tu de shtor and bai shom bred. So, forget LOL and ROFL as tools to make a language change.
@Wreybies "Yal chudke go to the shtor and by shom bred" < Why that's nearly Double Dutch. I think there's another aspect to consider...and that is: How it will be delivered With an eye to the now and one on the recent past I've spotted there's a law in place regarding the way we as people are communicating. Everything is speeding up; consider the amount we are consuming now vs not even two decades ago. It's a heck of a lot more. Information now finds its way (if we let it) into our heads at an alarmingly quick rate. This morning: woke up BBC news app fed in through eyes whilst listening to the key parts of a TV background programme. Into work and read a plethora of emails, answered some of them, consumed some weblinks that were in others. Snuck out of my routine to absorb someone's blog post. Twenty years back, likely worked a page or two on my Amstrad word processor and ogled page 3 of The Sun for a moment. The point I'm making is that with a new pace to life the value of quicker delivery of information may well force change. I see many portmanteaus popping up nowadays, a good chunk of them seem to stick and eventually find their way into the dictionary with their acronym allies the op mentions. Now feed us a new condensed language at a machine gun speed (see http://www.spritzinc.com for an example) and we may well be able to follow/keep up with the law of accelerating return. ^ All that said, who knows what the future holds. A longstanding bugbear of mine is my flash in the pan attention span that prevents me from learning or understanding shorthand.
So, I squeezed this sentence through the phonetic guide in a dictionary (http://dictionary.reference.com/) and got the following... yoo shoo'd goh tuh th_uh stawr uh_nd bahy suhm bred.
Take it 500 years further, on another planet that's been colonized by us, where linguistic isolation returns as a force to be reckoned with. Linguistic isolation is a powerful effector of language change. There's a mix of people, many of them come from languages where the grammar is inflected for grammatical case. We'll let gender stay out of the picture and leave all the nouns in a single gender. Shtor becomes shtarma for dative case, and the preposition drops altogether because the case ending already implies "to". Bred becomes bredal for accusative case as a simple direct object, and shom (some) becomes shomale as the adjectival accusative case. A new syllable trend also forces the stress of the word shomale to fall on the first syllable (sho-ma-leh). The and drops syntactically since it's logically implied. English in the year 3015, as postulated by Wreybies. Yal chudke go shtarma bai shómale bredal.
Yal chudke go tu de shtor and bai shom bred. reading that is crazy on the eyes. laugh out loud. in a story of mine a small ice age happens so English hasn't changed much but it has changed some enough to tell a difference. I find if you change it too much. Most English speakers today would find it too hard to read. so maybe the way people talk without phones and wide spread electronics would slow down good point Seth. I will keep that in mind for my draft 2.
i know Seth was talking about speeding up language but if a world wide disaster happened and electronics are cut from our society. Language would slow down a little.
No. It would not. Electronic communication actually has a homogenizing, stabilizing effect on language. Since the invention of the printing press, language change has ground to a near halt compared to how things were prior to that. If there were a serious disaster - the "poxeclipse" of Mad Max fame - this would create pockets of isolated language use all over the effected area because people would have drastically reduced ability to travel. These pockets would be breeding grounds for new change that's not smoothed over by the standardizing effect of digital media and communication. A world disaster would give rise to uncounted new languages, not slow things down.
As stated, I think voice recognition and translation software will make direct communication deprecated. I believe, people in the future won't talk to people, they'll talk to computers, that will translate their language and speak it natively to another person. And I don't mean though a complete language barrier, I mean even if they speak the same language, their personal computer/assistant will know if they don't know any words and automatically translate it. Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, and given that we're becoming more dependent on it every day, I think eventually it will even dictate/guide how we speak. I also think it might become more emotion-oriented, with images (like emoji). The problem with our current internet is, you can't express emotions though it (which is why I theorize memes are so popular, because it's a replacement for facial expressions, something critically human that isn't available though text). It's wishful thinking, but I think one day there will be only one language, a language computers understand. People will speak their own language, even if it's complete nonsense, the computer will understand it and translate it to the computer language, which will then be translated to someone else's native language when they want to read it. I know, a bit dystopian, but that's honestly how I see it working. There's too much of a language barrier between the youth and the older generation, there always has been and probably always will. This solves that problem, and technology aims to solve all problems. I don't know if that will really happen, but I suppose it's a possibility.
I counter postulate that English will drop every semblance of sythetic language and become entirely analytic.
I'm just gonna go all out because I love Cloud Atlas so, so much: 'Cloud Atlas' Sheds Light on English's Possible Future http://news.yahoo.com/cloud-atlas-sheds-light-englishs-possible-future-193253666.html In the futuristic sections of the novel "Cloud Atlas," by author David Mitchell, there are a few clues to tell readers that those parts aren't set in our own times. There are those perfectly human clones, for example. In the movie based on the novel, which comes out Oct. 26, there's a flying snowmobile that shoots lasers. But one of the central, if less flashy, ways that the novel takes its readers through time is through changes in the English language. With the movie coming out this week, TechNewsDaily wanted to know whether the future language changes Mitchell predicts are possible. They're probably very inaccurate, said Anthony Kroch, chair of the linguistics department at the University of Pennsylvania. But that's okay, he added. "Holding the author to the standard of, 'Well, this is an unlikely change' isn't reasonable," he said. "I actually thought that the author didn't do too bad a job," he said. "I think what he did was he picked up on some fairly obvious things and he invented some things that might happen and that would attract the reader's attention." The depiction of future language in "Cloud Atlas" illustrates some interesting points about language's evolution over time. The depiction also reveals how Mitchell created a futuristic, exotic atmosphere while keeping things understandable for those of us following the action at home. [SEE ALSO: Languages Lose Vocab to Science and Spell-Check] Fancier words for the past, simpler words for the future In the novel's far future, most human knowledge has been destroyed or forgotten. Few people are literate. Zachry, one of the book's main characters, opens the section with a story about meeting the devil. "So gimme some mutton an' I'll tell you 'bout our first meetin'," he says. "A fat joocesome slice, nay, none o' your burnt wafery off'rin's …" Zachry's speech looks strange to readers, but it's not as strange as the future English language really might be. A postapocalyptic English would likely be unintelligible to people today, Kroch said. After all, even without an apocalypse, English has changed so much over the last 400 years that modern people find Shakespeare hard to follow, he said. Yet authors can't make their books too difficult for readers to understand, so they need to write in a way that appears futuristic and exotic, but actually hews closely to language today. "You can only use things that are currently available in the language. Otherwise, people wouldn't understand you," Kroch said. One way Mitchell does this is by using highbrow language in the earlier sections of book, but simpler-sounding language in later sections of the book, Kroch said. "We have this intuition that fancy words are old-fashioned and common, short words are lower-class and contemporary," he said. "There is an idea that in the past, people spoke in a more elevated way than they do now." That's not actually true, but people get that impression because the only samples of language that survive from previous eras are well-preserved written pieces, Kroch said. Political treaties, noblemen's letters and literature for the upper classes naturally have more sophisticated language. Shakespeare's plays still live on, but recordings of ordinary people chatting in the streets of Elizabethan England don't exist. Mitchell gets around that problem by making the older chapters in "Cloud Atlas" excerpts from the letters and diaries of well-educated people. A dialect for the eye Another way Mitchell made future language in "Cloud Atlas" look more exotic is by changing capitalization rules, eliminating the spaces between certain words, and otherwise changing how words look on the page. The language is basically the same, however, and might not even be noticeably different if read aloud. [SEE ALSO: 'Hunger Games' Exposes Myth of Technological Progress] In Mitchell's postapocalyptic far future, for example, the characters talk about "huntin'n'shootin'." While that's not how modern English speakers would write "hunting and shooting," it's not much different from how they might say the phrase aloud. "In ordinary, everyday language, we routinely run words together and that's not some kind of laziness or special, extreme way of using language, but it is absolutely the ordinary way of using language," Kroch said. Linguists call such changes "eye dialect," Kroch explained. Eye dialect uses spelling and other writing tricks to suggest a dialect, but doesn't always accurately match the dialect it's trying to mimic. American readers may be familiar with eye dialect from the Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris, or from Mark Twain's books. Real possible changes It's difficult to predict future changes in the English language, Kroch said. Historically, some words have changed dramatically over time, while others have drifted, only to return to their original form. "You can't be at all confident that [a change] will spread or be reversed," he said. There are several changes Kroch thinks could happen in a post-apocalyptic world if the English language lost many of its books and illiteracy is rampant. Without writing to remind people of a standard, the mispronunciations of childhood could get ingrained in a language, Kroch said. While "Cloud Atlas" has people say "mem'ryin'" for "remembering," Kroch thinks a more likely change is the use of "member" for "remember," a common toddler mistake. The people of the future could drop other prefixes, too, Kroch said. "Treme" might replace "extreme"; "tend" might overtake "pretend." Grammar could remain as complex or even gain complexity, Kroch said, but without dictionaries to remind people of the hundreds of thousands of words in standard English, the language is likely to lose much of its vocabulary. English vocabulary has been partially shaped by writing, which allowed it to grow beyond any human's capability to remember. The rarity of books and of reading in Mitchell's far future is a sure sign of just how bad things have gotten, Kroch said. "It's a very interesting question. What would happen to English if it were disconnected from its literary tradition?" he said. "It would take an unbelievable catastrophe."
Interesting thought, but what seems to be the main change Mitchell is predicting is that in the future English will be a spoken language , whereas in his past it was a written language - because all he's got are letters and other documents. Which would leave a massive difference now between even this post and how many people would read it aloud. I read somewhere that you shouldn't write your dialect in phonemes, rather have the character's words exactly as normal (perhaps change the vocabulary and grammar to match) and attribute them as he said in a Geordie accent. Whereas Mitchell isn't doing that - he's using spoken dialect as if it were standard English. Secondly, Shakespeare ISN'T incomprehensible. Sure, he's using some words that we don't understand - one that leaps to mind is the reference to Queen Mab in Romeo and Juliet. But they're just fashionable slang. What if I referenced the lyrics of a song by Sallyangie? Would anybody here know what I'm talking about? And the reason why Shakespeare's incomprehensible is that actors don't speak his lines to be understood. Listen to almost any talent show and one thing you can be sure of is that most singers don't understand the words they're singing. So on the line It's a cold and it's a broken halleluia the orchestra and singer swells into a triumph - NOT at all cold and broken. I tend, on the other hand, to agree with Kroch in his suggestion that mispronunciations could become the norm. Won't that add to the confusion! You thought that tort, taut and taught were bad enough? Wait until member replaces remember, dismember, September and member!
In a sense, this has already been done in the marvellously groundbreaking book Riddley Walker. It's set in a dystopian future, and written in the language (as imagined) of the time. An amazing piece of work from all standpoints, really. Text-speak, while looking rather daft written down, is actually a truncation of actual speech. So I'm waiting 4U, is not actually changing the language. It's still I'm waiting for you. I do believe that written language might disappear in favour of spoken language ...although the problem of distracting folks trying to do their own work within earshot of the speaker is a bit of a problem. Can you imagine working in an office where nobody reads or writes anything, but just speaks? Yeeg. Will everybody need to wear earplugs and voice mufflers? Dunno.
There is good cause to agree with this. Indo-European languages have generally shown a trend where inflectional grammar gives way to isolating grammar. English is already nearly at a point of being completely analytic (isolating) with only vestigial traces of a once comprehensive inflectional system showing up only in the pronouns. Even goal of motion words have gone by the wayside, words that were laterally related to the inflectional system since they carry an implied preposition that gives them actual or conceptual direction (hither, thither, whither, hence, thence, whence). But, one never knows. My point to the little Game of Words was only to show that there are deeper structural dynamics in play than just silly slang and neologisms, both of which are always given much more attention than they deserve not only in casual conversation but also in the cloister of prescriptive linguistics where both are disdained. A shift in pronunciation is a tectonic change where a slang term is just a pebble rolling a few inches down the hillside... and then stopping... causing no landslide whatsoever.
The trend toward analytic was one reason. But it occurs to me that there are 10 million English speakers in China and the number is fast growing. It wouldn't be unheard of for the Chinese (over the next 500 years) to slowly adopt an English creole, using English vocabulary with Chinese grammar. As far as I understand Chinese is completely analytic, and doesn't even use tenses. "He has gone to the store" becomes in Chinese "He go store" and is grammatically correct. It's looking more and more like the languages on Earth are going to slowly homogenize, and there's no better language to do this than English, considering that 85% of it's vocabulary is made up of foreign originating words. (for example "foreign" is a French root, and origin is Latin)
