Sorry, in this thread, I had to!
> I expect the same thing will be done to the English language over the next century.
This has already been happening in English, for centuries. Compare these examples given in the article to modern English:
> 3) ...howe and by what certaine and generall rule I mighte trye and throughly discerne the veritie of the catholike faithe, from the falsehood of wicked heresye... (1554) > 4) You maie (saide I) trie and bring him in, and shewe him to her. (1569)
I suppose after more than 450 years, one might expect even more simplification, but it is perhaps the fate of a lingua franca to have more "backward compatibility" than less widely-used languages.
Previous lingua francas such as Latin and French, by comparison, had tens of millions of speakers at most during their heyday, and were less broadly geographically distributed. There are more French speakers in the world today than there were when French was dubbed the lingua franca.
It's difficult to predict how English might evolve, but it's unlikely to undergo a significant global simplification. You already get significantly different dialects in different parts of the world. If anything, if English starts to lose its position as a global language, it will fragment further and pick up new dialect-specific complexities as other local languages mix with it.
Could there be a reversal of this trend? Maybe, but it seems very unlikely, even with the potential for geopolitical instability from global warming, autonomous warfare, the rise of autocrats and other factors.