future english

[Boxlicker101]

English has changed a lot in the last hundred words or so but it has gotten more complicated. If you read a novel written during the 19th century there may be some spelling oddities but few words that are not easily recognized, except some outdated slang. On the other hand, if a person were to be transported to this year from the 19th century, he or she would have a tough time reading anything, with the new words, abreviations, etc.

"Indian" will probably be in the launguage for centuries but it will come to mean from India, or of Indian descent. Some of the other PC phrases will come to be seen as stupid and be dropped. Describing something as "PC" is ridiculing it. The same kind of thing used to be called a euphemism, and still is by some persons.

I think sports expressions have changed the language more than anything else in the last fifty years. Other groups, such as musicians, police, youths, and others have contributed but because of mass media, sports expressions are in more common use.

 

[hmmnmm]

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[Lucifer_Carroll]

On the other hand, we could always end up with the BB style of communication:

"And it'd be double-plus good!"

 

[Weird Harold]

As for the effect of technology on language I think the only other comparable event was the invention of the printing press. Think on how that changed the world, let alone language, and you might have an idea of how the net will change things now.

The Printing Press brought standardization to spelling and grammar in the written word and exposed parochial groups to a wider vocabulary.

Radio and Television brought us "BBC English" which has the same homgenizing/standardizing effect on the spoken language.

I'm not sure if the Internet -- and the lack of copy editors to correct grammar and spelling before printing -- is going to undo some of the standardization the printing press brought or if it's just changing the standards. I know that reading badly written amateur fiction has caused me to be less certain about trusting "what looks right" for spelling.

The printing press, radio, television, and the internet, are all technologies that tend to homogenize and stabilize the language. Isolation and Parochialism give rise to regional dialects and communications technology tends to suppress them.

I think sports expressions have changed the language more than anything else in the last fifty years. Other groups, such as musicians, police, youths, and others have contributed but because of mass media, sports expressions are in more common use.

Sports expression have always been a big influence on language. Expressions like "Play ball," "It's not cricket" have been part of the language for over 200 years, so it's not a recent phenomenon by any means.

Political correctness will have more impact on the future of the language than anything else.

PC dictates that we drop certain words and phrases from what we would consider normal usage. Words like Indian, midget, etc.

"Political Correctness" is a temporary phenomenon in the long term. There have been other periods when social conciousness dictated certain "acceptable usages" in language and the lasting effects on the language itself has been minimal. I've lived through about six-dozen different "proper terminologies" for Afro-Americans and Native-Americans and I expect to see at least a dozen more before I die.

In the long run, changing "proper terminologies" mean about as much as the changing names of political parties have over the centuries -- it doesn't matter what they're called, they're still politicians.