hi everyone.
welcome to my new series where I make languages inspired by ideas I think have missed potential.
in this first season, I’ll be creating a speculative future language descended from
English.
I’m jan Misali, and this is retconlang.
in this first video I’m just gonna plan out some general things.
so, I won’t be doing any specific design details just yet.
also, anything I come up with is extremely subject to change.
I can and probably will change my mind about anything and go back and change stuff.
you know, in the spirit of this being retcon-lang, I think it’s only fitting to have room for
that sort of thing.
anyway, right, the idea here is based loosely on this conlang called “Futurese”, which
is a pretty underdeveloped thing that’s supposed to be a language descended from General
American English spoken in the year 3000.
I put a link in the description to where you can read about that.
I made a video about it too but that video was not very good.
so, the idea for my future English conlang is that it’s a descendant of Inland North
American English spoken in the year 2983, Inland North American English being the dialect
of English that I speak.
side note, I do not like that name.
I think it’s very misleading.
this is North America.
this is the region of North America which is inland. and this is where Inland North
American English is spoken.
so from here on out I’ll be calling it Great Lakes English instead.
Great Lakes English is spoken in the region just south of the American Great Lakes, which
includes cities like Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse.
this region is sometimes grouped in with some Canadian cities to the north of the Great
Lakes and referred to as the very cool sounding “Great Lakes Megalopolis”.
specifically because I like how cool the name “Great Lakes Megalopolis” sounds, I decided
to call my conlang “Megalopolian”, even though there’s cities where Great Lakes
English isn’t spoken like Toronto and Montreal that are still part of the Great Lakes Megalopolis.
the most distinctive feature of Great Lakes English is the Northern Cities Vowel Shift,
a sound shift that just shuffles all the vowels around.
it’s the reason why when I say the word “solid” some people think it sounds kinda
like I’m saying “salad”.
there’s several individual parts to the NCVS, and not every Great Lakes English speaker
does all of them.
it varies a lot from city to city.
this table here is showing the Great Lakes pronunciations of the vowels relevant to the
NCVS in the most advanced version of the shift.
my own pronunciation of these vowels is pretty close to this, though my STRUT vowel is definitely
not that.
BILL LABOV: now, this is spectacular.
RECORDING: “[bʌsɨz]”
BILL: everyone writes down what?
ROBERT MACNEIL: “bosses”.
BILL: right, the guy.
ROBERT: yeah.
RECORDING: “the [bʌsɨz] with the antennas-”
ROBERT: heh!
BILL: now you begin to wonder, what are these “bosses with the antennas”?
ROBERT: yeah.
BILL: okay,
RECORDING: “I can remember vaguely when we had the [bʌsɨz] with the antennas on
the top.”
ROBERT: so “busses” has become “bosses”.
BILL: right.
MITCH: in this full version of the shift, vowels are moved around to the extent that
they can be misheard as different vowel phonemes to people without the shift.
it’s not really that noticeable in context though, because it’s not that hard to adjust
to someone else’s pronunciations of words.
kinda like how you can rotate the colors in an image and you can still tell what it is,
rotating vowels around in vowel space usually doesn’t make words harder to understand.
anyway, if we assume that the full version of the NCVS not only stays stable but also
spreads further than its current domain, the Great Lakes English starting point has something
like this as its vowel inventory, plus a few reduced vowels and some allophony.
oh, I should also clarify that the split between “wise” and “price” as two separate
vowels isn’t a thing specific to Great Lakes English.
that’s a shift I like to call “PRICE raising” found throughout Northern US and Canada.
I can get into some more of the specifics of all these vowels in future videos when
I’m talking about how they can develop further from here, but one thing I’d like to point
out is that since the NCVS exists in slightly different forms in different parts of the
Great Lakes region, that could be used as a source of variation between different dialects
of the eventual Megalopolian language.
so I’ll have to keep that in mind.
now, if you’re familiar with the history of the English language, you might notice
a parallel between the Northern Cities Vowel Shift and another significant sound shift,
the Great Vowel Shift. just like how the Great Vowel Shift is what defines the start of Modern
English, the Northern Cities Vowel Shift is what separates Great Lakes English from General
American English.
I guess presenting it as a linear timeline like this isn’t that great.
I mean, first of all, it’s completely ignoring all the other languages and dialects that
branch off at each of these points.
also, calling Modern English “modern” probably doesn’t work from the perspective
of someone in the distant future.
to that first point, Megalopolian is not the future form of the English language.
it’s one of many English languages spoken in 2983. and yeah I probably should work out
some details of the other major English languages at some point for this project.
and to the other point, here’s my sketch of the full timeline for the development of
Megalopolian, from the perspective of someone in the late thirtieth century.
I think calling Modern English “Imperial” English instead makes sense, as it’s the
language of the British Empire.
you’ll notice that I have Megalopolian divided up into stages, “Old”, “Middle”, and
“Modern”. the year 2983 is as far into the future as the year 1059 was in the past.
1059 was a few years before the Norman Invasion in 1066, putting it at the later end of the
Old English period.
quite a bit after Beowolf, but also quite a bit before Chaucer.
so, any English language spoken in the late 30th century would be as different from the
language I’m speaking now as this language is from the Old English spoken in the mid
eleventh century.
with that amount of time to deal with, working it out in stages just makes more sense.
first Great Lakes English to Old Megalopolian, then Old Megalopolian to Middle Megalopolian,
then Middle Megalopolian to Modern Megalopolian, then finally from Modern Megalopolian to the
specific form of Modern Megalopolian spoken in 2983.
for each of those stages I gotta figure out a few things.
mainly, how the phonology develops, how the vocabulary changes, and pretty importantly,
how the grammar changes.
to be able to do that properly, I’ll also need to work out some external things.
how will the various cultures of the Great Lakes Megalopolis change over the course of
a thousand years?
how will other English languages influence the Megalopolian language?
what about other language families?
there are a few specific worldbuilding related details that I do already have figured out,
which of course I can flesh out more later.
Imperial English stays preserved, at least in some form.
I mean, a language can’t become a billion-person lingua franca and then just completely disappear,
you know?
I think it makes sense for it to have a similar role in this future as Latin does now.
it could even be used as a source for international vocabulary.
then one related question is how long the idea of a singular common English language
lasts. which languages get recognized as separate from English first?
I mean, besides Scots. and I guess also not including the various English-based pidgins
and creoles.
past the point where the languages are no longer mutually intelligible, how long do
they hold on to a common written language?
I think that Megalopolian drops the quote unquote “imperial spellings” and gains
its own orthography sometime in the Middle Megalopolian period, but what about other
English languages?
maybe there’s some that never get a spelling reform and hold on to the same orthography
we’re using now all the way in the 2980s.
I’d also like to figure out some technological advancements.
those do happen to be a common reason for new vocabulary to be introduced, and for existing
vocabulary to shift in meaning.
see the current use of the word “phone”. for a while I was like, pretty sure that this
future would be one where an artificial general intelligence has taken over the world, but
dang that would be such a bummer of a future.
I’ll come up with something.
oh, and speaking of bummers, there’s a certain ongoing global crisis (no, not that ongoing
global crisis, the other one) that’s going to dramatically and violently change the geopolitical
landscape.
so you know, just gotta predict the extent to which global warming will alter the demographics
of this specific part of the world, specifically in terms of how it relates to language.
nothing that can go wrong there!
also like, what about space travel?
seems kinda inevitable that at some point in the next thousand years there will be some
sort of permanent settlements off the planet.
what sorts of languages do they speak on the Moon or on Mars?
how do they influence the English languages spoken terrestrially?
there’s a lot of fun directions I could take this in, and I intend to explore all
the most interesting ones before this series is over.
as I’ve said before, I have no idea how often you should expect new videos in this
series.
I’ll just be working on Megalopolian as a side project as I’m doing my usual videos,
and I’ll give you an update whenever I have enough details to fill a new video.
until then, lemme know if there’s any other ideas you’d like to see explored in this
season.
I promise you won’t have to wait as long for the next episode as you did for this one.
I’ve got a lot of other completely unrelated stuff I’ve been working on, so you’ll
see that pretty soon, but you know, eventually you will get another update on this conlang
project.
before I go, thank you so much to everyone who bought my new album (disambiguation).
apparently, some people think it’s good.
no idea how that happened.
anyway, I’ve been jan Misali.
I don’t have a sign off for this series yet.