So let’s talk about the future. Without some kind of time machine, we can’t know
what’s going to happen in the years to come. But that doesn’t stop us from thinking and
wondering and planning. We make predictions about everything! Not just things like
hoverboards or dehydrated pizza, but also about language: how it’ll change, what we’ll
be speaking, and even how many languages we’ll even have. And we’ve been doing this for ages:
people in the past made predictions about their future, which is our present.
I'm Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
When we want to make predictions about the future of language, a good place to start
is by thinking about the past. And I mean exactly that: let’s talk about what some
people think might happen with the past tense in English. The general rule for English past
tense is pretty straightforward: take that –ed and slap it on the end of a verb, and
then it’ll change pronunciation to [t], [d], or [ɪd] depending on what the verb ends
in. That’s how that morpheme works.
But of course, English is a natural language, and natural languages? They’re not clean.
So we’ve got oodles of exceptions to account for in the English past tense: go becomes
went, not goed; bend turns to bent, not bended; think goes to thought, and many, many more.
And all of those have to be accounted for: when we learn the past tense of English, we
also need to memorize all those exceptions, or we’re not going to fit into our linguistic communities.
Here’s the thing, though: there used to be a looooot more exceptions. If you think
English has a lot of irregular verbs to keep track of now, we used to have nearly twice
as many. From the ones that we have on record, we’ve dropped from 177 exceptions down to 98.
Like, in 1500, no one would have said Lorraine helped Calvin inside, because the past tense of help
wasn't helped, it was holp [həʊlp]. But now, help is all normal, and so are laughed,
walked, and many more. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could predict what other verbs were
going to fall in line and become regular, like look it up in some future almanac and
know the fate of English?
Well, some real predictions have been made for what changes we might see, in a 2007 paper
published in Nature. See, unlike the regular rule, which we internalize when we’re tiny
wug-loving toddlers, all the irregulars have to be memorized. And to memorize them, you
need to hear them enough to know that they should be irregular.
That might be easy with things like "have" or "say", where we hear them all the time. But
words that aren’t as common are in danger of having their weird forms get forgotten
and just fade away into nothingness. Take something like "cleave". If you were going to
use the word at all, you’d probably say you’d cleaved some meat for dinner, right?
Not cleft? "Cleft" is the old irregular form for it. But it’s mostly gone now.
The researchers in the study looked at the rate of use of verbs that have changed in
the past, and found that English regularizes them at a rate that is inversely proportional
to the square root of their usage frequency. So something that is used 100 times less often
will become just a regular verb 10 times as fast. And working with this formula and a
lot of data, they made some predictions about what’s most likely to fall out of English
over the next century or two. "Smite" will lose its irregular "smote" and leave behind "smited",
and "wed" will get divorced from, well, "wed", and just be "wedded".
Will that prediction work out? Well, again, we can’t really know. We do know that languages
have lost bigger things over time: English itself has lost gender marking on nouns and
the ability to order words in pretty much any way it pleases. Japanese has lost
two of its regular verb classes and merged some of its tenses together. Mandarin lost
the ability to stick regular stops like [p], [t], and [k] at the end of syllables, in the
coda. Lots and lots can happen.
Of course, the biggest thing that can happen is for languages to just die out completely.
It’s hard to get an exact count of the number of languages that exist now, or that existed
even a few decades ago, but there’s no question that we’ve been losing languages to extinction
at an alarming rate. Once there are no more speakers of a language, that’s pretty much it for its future.
Even if we can’t determine the precise number of languages that exist, because that gets
into defining dialects vs. languages and other thorny issues, we can say there’s around
6 or 7 thousand languages left. If we look at Ethnologue, a database of languages from
around the world, they list 7,102 at present. Some other sites, like the Endangered Language
Fund, cite about 6,000. So that’s about the right ballpark.
Well, linguists have predicted that about half of these languages, or 3,000 or so, are
virtually guaranteed to go extinct over the next century. And it’s not hard to find
estimates that go way beyond that. John McWhorter said earlier this year, for example, that
he forecasted a drop of 90% in the number of the remaining languages in the world in
100 years. That’s a huge, huge drop, almost unimaginably big.
Let’s put this into perspective with an example country: Paraguay. Paraguay’s in the centre of South America,
and it’s an interesting place linguistically, with a very vibrant
population speaking an indigenous language, Guaraní, as well as Spanish, among many others.
It’s not a huge country, though, with about 6.5 million people. Now, how many endangered
languages would you predict there'd be in a country this size? Well, Ethnologue lists 24 languages
in use currently in Paraguay, and of those, 12 are vulnerable to extinction. So there’s
your 50%. Some, like Guana, already have no monolingual speakers left, and under 100 speakers
overall. That’s really hard to come back from.
There’s a lot of information like this, and it’s easy to search through; for example,
UNESCO has a really engrossing interactive atlas where you can search by country or by
level of endangerment. But can we really say that all of these languages are destined to
fade out, with no roads to the future? Well, for many, it really may be too late. But there
are a lot of efforts at revitalizing languages – for example, the RNLD, or Resource Network
for Language Diversity. So for some of the languages, if we work on it and try to change,
hopefully, they can be saved.
What’s leading to this huge dying off of languages? Well, there are a lot of factors,
and we’ll put some links in the video description to discussions of those in more detail.
But one big factor is the perceived utility of the languages on the part of the people
learning them or teaching them to their kids. Kids acquiring the language are the lifeblood
of any linguistic community – they’re the future generation of speakers, after all.
And parents want to give their kids a boost and make their way in the world easier. In
many cases, unfortunately, that doesn’t include picking up these endangered languages.
This is a real tragedy, since multilingual acquisition doesn’t hurt kids – but it’s
part of what’s going on in a complex situation.
Turning away from that discussion – and seriously, take a look at some of the links
down in the description if you’re interested – we can look at a related issue: a world
language. If the number of languages is shrinking, and people want to learn something that will
let them communicate with anyone, are we all going to end up speaking the same language
at some point? It’s not hard to find predictions online that in the future, we’ll all be
speaking Mandarin. Or English. How likely is that to come to pass?
Well… again, it’s impossible to know. But we here at the Ling Space are somewhat
skeptical about this. Concentrating everyone into one particular language, no matter how
many people speak it, seems kind of unlikely. Everyone is a lot of people, and the world’s
a big place. What’s more likely to us is people clustering around a number of different
hub languages that they see as being useful. Someone from Peru might find different languages
useful than someone from Laos, or from, say, Libya. For a lot of people, that language
might be English, or maybe Mandarin, but for others, maybe it’ll be Spanish, or Russian, or Japanese.
That’s the finding from a 2014 paper, which looks at what languages are connected by
people who translate books, edit Wikipedia, or use Twitter. The idea is that these are
activities that someone will probably only do if they’re pretty solid in both languages.
And then they linked up these different linguistic co-expressions into networks, to see what
languages are more likely to pair up, like, which languages people are more likely to be bilingual in.
And yes, English does show up quite a lot, as you’d expect – there’s lots of writing,
online and off, happening in English. But other significant hubs do exist, around
Portuguese, Chinese, German, and more. These intermediate networks represent lots of people
who view these languages as being useful.
Of course, it’s not possible to know the future. We don’t have a working DeLorean
to take us around, and we can’t see where things are going to be in 30 years, much less
later. But we can make some solid predictions about where things are going to go. Some of
these outcomes are good and some are bad, and some are kind of neither, but our linguistic
futures are what we make of them. So let’s get traveling and see what we can do.
GREAT SCOTT! We’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you correctly
predicted what I was going to say, you learned that the English past tense may get even more
regularized than it is already; that many languages spoken in the world today
are predicted to die off in the coming century; and that we may end up with a global language,
but it’s more likely there will be a bunch.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production assistant
is Stephan Hurtubise, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our
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And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Jajotopata!