How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand

I've seen this type of story so many times it almost seems like a template:

There is a variant of our [primary audience's] native tongue. Its user base is growing. Soon you might be forced to learn this strange culture/young people's bastardization of our language to function in society!

It's an interesting topic, for sure, but the consequences are always so overblown.

I wonder if this is a common story in other languages.

This is a genuinely terrible article with an overblown and under-researched thesis - just a lot of uneducated pontificating.

One way you can tell, for example, is his treatment of the Singlish phenomena in the same context as mainland Chinese English when, at even the most casual glance, they are completely different things. (Singlish is a primary day-to-day language for a large number of people - mainland Chinese-English is not. Singlish is often spoken by native/fluent English speakers who have been educated in English from primary school to university; the situation in mainland China is the opposite.)

As long as English remains the international language of commerce the incentives to keep all dialects mutually intelligible should prevent too much divergence.

Shi Ma? Somebody's been watching Firefly re-runs?

I find this idea ridiculistic.

This article's outlook is way too simplistic; Chinese won't be the only influence on English's future. China still accounts for only a somewhat small fraction of English speakers, so other languages and cultures will have as much, if not more, impact. Also, this time won't be like Latin- there won't be any collapse of global society, so eventually the various dialects will homogenize, both because everyone has to understand them (otherwise what's the point of a lingua franca?) and because people from all over will be interacting so much. The end result probably won't be exactly like modern English, but I don't expect it to be too far removed, as all the changes should more or less balance themselves out.

Well, pidgin english is widespread accross west africa, and I've met several native french speakers from cameroun who can not speak english, but can speak pidgin english. Also, with the advent of cheap flights and phones, pidgin english is normalising accross the entire western coast of africa - from sierra leone down to west cameroun. Previously, the pidgin english used to use many words that could not be understood, but those words are dropping away.

So already, there are large areas where english has been changed into a form that is difficult to understand for native english speakers, and the new form of english is spreading faster than standard english.

I'm not buying the article's comparison with Latin. A big reason that Latin forked off into Spanish, Italian, French, etc. is because of the influence of Germanic and Moorish invaders. Also, the vast majority of people living during the Dark Ages were illiterate and had no idea that their Vulgar Latin was evolving into something else. Add to this the fact that most populations were isolated from each other.

Today, we have widespread literacy, sound recordings and linguists who are able to identify these trends. Humans are becoming less and less isolated, so there are actually fewer opportunities for English to diverge, not more.

I would think more influence on English will come from India. They have many more native somthing-like-English speakers.

I'm not sure I understand it /now/.

http://tinyurl.com/6yb9t4 (warning, website is safe for work, but has sound.)