I saw this pretty cool video today that speculates on the future of the English language in the coming decades.
In my opinion I agree mostly with what the guy in the video said. I think English will have many more dialects than it does today and it is possible it could have sub-categories to where it’s almost split off to a difference language influenced by the great amount of non-native speakers learning the language. However on the other hand with the Internet and how every is ever more inter-connected through technology it’s possible that the language wouldn’t sheer off into these different sub-categories, and there would be a general medium where most could understand each other.
I think in any case the English language will evolve in the future, I think with the more the world because more globablized it will be influence by other languages and cultures and with the influence of the Internet I think English will be a lot more abbreviated and shortened to communicate things quicker and more efficiently.
So what direction do you all think English will take?
My instinct tells me that there will be a world standard “business/pidgin English” which will be a formally simplified version of current standard English. It will be like present day texting but fleshed out and codified.
It will be a school subject for non-native English speakers but will be passively intelligible to native speakers that remain. It will use, as standard, things like emoticons and other visual symbols that are now considered informal and a little childish.
It might only be a fully viable language in written form.
We can extrapolate the future form of English from the style of the messages in the forum in which they exchange Skype IDs in order to practice speaking English. I feel sorry for the native speakers of English in the English-speaking countries, who should strive to stick to their own English or create a new one of their own.
P.S.
“But, i am not so sure. Its difficult to predict the future because i am not an astrologer.”
I would like to point out that I do not see my prediction, should it come true, as a bad thing. Our current English is not somehow better than my future predicted English; nor is current standard English better than earlier standards.
