Keys Corner

All languages evolve, even French, despite the efforts of the Académie Française to freeze their language. If you are interested in how languages have evolved in the past, then take a look at The Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer, which despite having been written over 60 years ago is still one of the best books on the evolution of languages. In fact, by showing how modern languages have evolved from common roots, it can also help spot patterns that help learning a new language.

There’s an interesting short article in today’s Daily Mail about how English is likely to evolve in the coming decades. (It summarizes a more detailed – and more interesting – article in the New Scientist [subscription required to read the full article]). The people pushing the evolution will probably be non-native speakers – those using English as a second language. There are well over a billion non-native English speakers today, compared with around 320 million native speakers, and they will drive a simplification of the language:

... As the new language takes over, “the” will become “ze”,
“friend” will be “frien” and the phrase “he talks” will become “he talk”...

However, this doesn’t mean that more people will be able to use this simplified English to communicate with each other, as at the same time the local variations that exist today will continue to exist and evolve too, resulting in increasing fragmentation into regional dialects. This is what happened to Latin, when between AD 300 and AD 800 it evolved into Italian, French and Spanish. Interestingly, the New Scientist suggests that what may function as the “glue” between the different dialects is scientific and technical writing, as well as worldwide media. This is what has happened with Arabic, which has many local spoken dialects, united by the literary Arabic of the Koran.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 18:03:31 and is filed under Language / Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.