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Comment by DarkTree | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if anyone knows in what direction a language evolves over time. Does it grow randomly with the addition of words/phrases, or is their a system of 'natural selection'? The American English language is certainly growing as new words become commonplace, but will other words die out completely? The reason for this question is because I wonder if languages become more efficient over time. For instance, what will the American English language be like in 100 years? Will it just be larger, or will it be more precise? It would be interesting if we create more and more precise words over time so that we actually stop using less precise words, making the language ultimately as efficient as possible. I guess it depends on so many things, like dialect/region/age/etc.

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There are a lot of competing factors that drive language change. Probably the largest force is sound efficiency - speakers merge, elide, and otherwise mess with sounds in order to make speaking take less energy, or make it possible to talk faster (think runnin' instead of running). This increases efficiency for a while, until homonyms take over and meanings become too frequently ambiguous. (Think of the cot/caught merger, although that one probably confuses no one.) Then, speakers start to use lots of periphrasis and such, and eventually big compound descriptions get lexicalized as new words and grammatical structures. This makes the language more complex as it originally was. Thus language evolution often happens in cycles like this on the order of centuries.

The major factor that influences the equilibrium of this cycle is number of speakers and number of adult learners. Languages with lots of speakers change more slowly, and tend to be getting simpler especially if they are assimilating new speakers (think English as it is becoming the global lingua franca.) Small insular languages with few second language learners tend to get more complex and idiosyncratic.

Source: studied linguistics for a few years.

Linguistic evolution is much like biological evolution in that there is no a priori direction for it to go. There is a sort of natural selection in that words that don't get used don't generally get passed on to the next generation. Text and other media allow some of these words to be recovered in later generations.

If history is any indication, in 100 years American English will have some precise ways of expressing things, some loose ways of expressing things, and various groups of people will be unreasonably upset with one situation or the other.

If you're interested in the mechanisms of language change, I found the (2000) 3rd edition of Jean Aitchison's _Language Change: Progress or Decay?_ both readable and worth reading. There is a 4th edition, published in 2013:

http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/languages-ling...

Languages grow simpler over time, in my view. I'm not an etymologist, but in my experience, long phrases that are used often are replaced with simpler ones. This isn't just in English, it's the same in Polish.

And if you don't trust my anecdata, look up the German and Japanese language reform. I don't speak much of those, but they have stronger ruling bodies over their language, making it easier to track change in language. It appears the reforms slowly make the language simpler, based on feedback from the populace.

Replacing long phrases with fewer words is not "simpler" in any measure of language simplicity I've ever heard. In fact, "simple" usually means fewer words and variety, and thus, longer sentences for covering more complex concepts.

An explosion of jargon and slang doesn't make a language simple, it adds layers and layers of exclusivity and nuance.

That's debatable. As a learner of English as a foreign language, I (and my classmates) had a much harder time understanding "simple" words.

Throw a word like "rotate", and it's just a matter of memorizing what the word means. Throw in a "simple" word like "turn", and it has a gazillion different meanings for every situation. It's a total nightmare for language learners.

Have you read Simple English?

'Turn' has many meanings because it has been used too often for reducing the number of words in sentences. You only have two choices when you want to do this: invent a new term (and totally confuse everyone) or use a related term (and let tome of the existing meaning bleed through.) Both of which make the language more complex.

You'd like The Story of Human Language (http://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/story-of-human-langua...). John McWhorter is engaging and the subject matter is interesting.

One thing he mentions in the series is that languages tend to become more simple over time as they come into contact with others. This makes sense--if you're bringing people into a community who don't know the language then they're going to simplify it and that will spread. The languages that are the most complex are the ones that are most isolated. Here's a blog post about it: http://lingblog.com/2013/12/23/can-the-structure-of-society-...

American English was basically invented by Webster, yet there are many words from his reinvention that didn't catch on. You can also find many modern words in the Oxford dictionary, like "lol". So it seems that both deliberate, and accidental expansions/contractions of the language are possible.

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