Re: Information on future English language development?

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 16:57:11 +0100, Simon Richard Clarkstone wrote:
> I only agree with you partly there.  Due to increased global
> communications, English could also be said to be changing less, as a
> better connected language community makes change of language more
> difficult: a new word will be very unlikely to spread fast enough to
> last long.
Hard to say.  It's clear that there are entirely localized sound-changes
going on in some English-speaking countries which appear not even to be
spreading beyond the home region in which they arose, e.g. the Northern
Cities Shift in the US, or the "bruvver"-dialects in Great Britain. Such
kinds of changes could ultimately lead to the breakup of colloquial speech,
while the acrolect is perpetuated by the education system, leading to
Swiss-style diglossia.

(Other changes certainly are spreading.  I seem to be hearing more
and more Northerners in Chicago use "y'all" for the second person plural,
and some young people from New York say they also use it. It is conceivable
at such a rate of spread that in 100-150 years or so, most of North America
will have adopted it, thence perhaps to other countries.)

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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