Dust off your time machine and set it to 1000 years in the past.
When you get there, grab the nearest English speaker.
How can you tell?
They’re the ones that sound like this: eac þonne þær beoð wildeor acenned.
Now hop back in and turn that dial 1000 years into the future.
What will Future English be like?
Since most of us don’t have time machines, how can we predict the future at all?
With fortune tellers and crystal balls.
Or maybe with physics, which predicts that if a certain object travels a certain speed
for a set amount of time, it will cover a certain distance - no more, no less.
Say your mom jumps in Zoomcar and tears away at 92mph for 15 minutes.
When we pull out a really, really long ruler to measure how far she’s gone, this equation
predicts that she’ll travel precisely 23 miles.
Great!
But where’s the foolproof equation for predicting complex social things like languages?
This isn’t physics, you say?
Well, are there at least trends?
Okay, here’s a possibility: complicated words with a lot of moving pieces often get
simpler over time.
It’s not a rule, but we could find more of these patterns.
But it gets more complicated, because our language’s look and feel will depend on
the path it takes through future history.
I mean, sometimes a single language branches out into a full family tree.
The progeny might differ subtly from one town to the next, or they might sound totally different
from each other.
Will Future English actually turn into an entire family?
But that family doesn’t have to come from proper English.
Close your eyes and picture what English looks like to you.
Did you see this?
If your name’s Professor Kachru, you sure did.
The people living in this inner circle think they speak the “real” English.
But Future English could be an underdog champ from India or China or even inner city slang...
dawg.
Remote islands, jungles and mountain villages are sometimes home to rare languages that
are almost like living fossils.
Will Future English survive like a time capsule, giving future scholars the chance to marvel
that, "Wow!, this remnant sounds almost as quaint and archaic as people did back in the
year 2014!"
Languages can take the middle road, changing and not changing at the same time.
It sounds weird at first, but all it takes is a dash of diglossia (meaning “double
tongues”).
Thanks to a uniform written Chinese, a book from Beijing can be read in Hong Kong, but
when locals from Beijing travel to Hong Kong, they find themselves surrounded by a completely
different language.
Will Future English be like this, see-sawing between a rigid, cohesive language and a patchwork
of local languages?
Even stranger are creoles, languages that almost come to life out of the bones of other
languages.
(Yeughck!)
Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea snags most of its words from English, but it’s still full
of “foreign” features.
Seriously, they have different words for talking to one person, two people, three people, or
a bunch of people.
But a creolized Future English – is that a bit extreme?
Nah, we haven’t even reached the extremes.
What if in the wake of some catastrophe only three speakers remain?
Think of those last speakers out there, or the loneliest man on earth wandering the Amazon
– are these the last breaths of once-great languages?
Meanwhile, whichever path you choose, the future of zoom car seems pretty set.
It’ll just keep following this equation: speed goes up, more distance covered.
But things could go many ways for Future English.
C’mon, imagine the sci-fi utopias or dystopias or flat-out normal topias we might find ourselves
in!
So, perhaps, "what will become of Future English?" is not too different than asking, "what will
become of future us?"