Re: THEORY: Anglic languages (was: Difthongization...)

--- John Vertical <johnvertical@...> wrote:

> >On 19/02/08 21:48:23, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> >> It's part of sweeping changes taking place in
> North American
> >> English. [...]
> >
> >A bad thing? As a conlanger, surely not! It's just
> the Real World
> >conlanging for a change. Europe and India manage to
> get by just fine
> >with lots of different languages. Why couldn't
> North America? The
> >written language needn't break up right away
> anyway: Much like the
> >status of Latin in the early stages of the Romance
> family/late stages
> >of Vulgar Latin.
> >
> >--
> >Tristan.
>
> I assume English is even bigger a mess than Vulgar
> Latin was, tho. It also
> demonstrates nicely that language change doesn't
> work strictly phylogenetically.
>
> Which brings me to another topic: what do you
> suppose future linguistics
> will come to consider the "primary branches" of the
> Anglic languages? Will
> the basic geographical divisions be maintained? How
> about beyond them, can
> those be bunched into larger groups (according to
> when each group split off
> from Britain?) or will we just have to do with
> Proto-Anglic > half a dozen
> different subfamilies? Which isoglosses will be
> considered family-defining,
> which areal influence / parallel developments -
> rhotacity, cot-caught,
> pin-pen, th-stopping?
>
> (Actually, on second thought, let's put this under
> THEORY too.)
>
> John Vertical
>
I have no crystal ball, but from the way things look
now I cannot see divergence of the main English
dialects  being likely, indeed perhaps even the
opposite. That is not to say English will not develop
and change, it clearly will, I just don't think it
will split.

Two interconnected reasons for that - Firstly
divergence requires isolation, and secondly there
seems to be more of a trend towards standardisation.

With the collapse of the Empire you have a situation
where Roman dialect groups are separated by vast (for
the period) gepgraphic distances with no means of
instantaneous communication between the various
groups.

Compare that to the current situation with
telecommunications, media, global trade, etc where
geographical distance is now irrelevant and you remove
the possibility of isolation -  barring some kind of
catastrophic instantaneous collapse of all
civilisation and technology, which seems more than
unlikely.

I think the predominance of American entertainment
media, IT and so on is causing some convergence
(definitely on a lexical level, and in certain
instances at a phonetic level too). There is also,
e.g. for economic reasons, a very great need to ensure
that there is mutal intelligibility that I think
provides an impetus for standardisation.

I think you could reasonably demonstrate that what is
happening globally today is akin to what has happened
at a national level over the past few centuries with
regards to language standardisation and a reduction in
the number of dialects.

It is very possible that English will not remain a
lingua franca long term, although it seems to have
many features that make it ideally suited. If/when
that time comes I suspect a whole raft of English
varieties will disappear from non-L1 areas - India,
Africa, etc.

Notwithstanding that sort of a retreat there will
still be a core L1 English group that will remain i.e.
British/Irish, North American and Antipodean. I really
cannot imagine that these would become unitelligible
to each other. If the dialects even manage to survive
being subsumed into a standardised behemoth, surely a
more a likely scenario would be per the current
situation with Scots and Scottish English, where you
have a small continuum between a local dialect and the
standard language with a lot of 'contamination' of the
dialect?

Another remoter possibility perhaps, is that the
position of English globally has passed (or will pass
at some point before another language can take its
place) a tipping point that ensures it remains the
main international language. That could lead to a
situation where 'English' is distinguished from the
language shared by GB/IRL/USA/CDN/AUS/NZ?  But again,
given the advantageous position such a global language
would bestow on native speakers, would its L1 speakers
allow their language to drift too far from it?


P.

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