Nobody knows. So, we can look around for known pieces, but we should know that we are only guessing.
I am not a linguist, so it is only easier for me to go wild.
I presuppose that this future includes flesh humans using some of the existing (flesh) communication means—I doubt we can correctly predict any interesting language consequences of complete computational medium change.
Let’s start with “changes as they always occured”.
If we look at long-term available history, there are examples of cyclical change in grammar structure. The simplest example Zaliznyak gives in his lecture about this is that will got shortened to ’ll and it slowly becomes a prefix signifying future tense.
Also, historically, pronounciation caused orphography changes -different in different in partially isolated populations, of course. Also, borrowing, mangling and direct invention of words occured in such populations separately, of course.
What can we look at now? It looks like geographical closeness can sometimes be a weaker factor than membership in some subculture or online community from the language change point of view. Of course, earlier there were some language changes specific to a single proffession or social stratum; nowadays one person can participate in more language enironments that should reduce isolation but make neologism spread faster.
Acceleration of technological changes and social changes these technological changes bring increases the amount of new notions—and words—that have to be created as an expansion of language, not as size-preserving change. On the other hand, looking up a new word you encounter is easier, and at the same time some old notions become obsolete. This should increase the speed of vocabulary update; it may bring some unforeseen changes, but for me these are unknown unknowns.
The idea that written text is used for real-time communication is relatively new and already leads to sloppy orthography. So oral speech is probavly losing its role of change driver.
What more radical changes can occur?
If the speech is a means of human communication, it should be a relatively rapid stream of patterns in space and time.
It is likely that soones or later (decades timescale) large amount of mobile electronics can make practical using some other senses for communications. For example, it may turn out that reusing sense of touch is better because it doesn’t have to leak (as sound does) and doesn’t require focusing (as sight does).
A known unknown that can change grammatical structure of speech is computer language processing. I cannot predict what it will achieve, but every change in its capablities can significantly affect language. Fo example, ones automatic translation beats some threshold, some people will construct texts that are intentionally easier—or intentionally harder—to translate automatically.
What is the future of human languages?
Nobody knows. So, we can look around for known pieces, but we should know that we are only guessing.
I am not a linguist, so it is only easier for me to go wild.
I presuppose that this future includes flesh humans using some of the existing (flesh) communication means—I doubt we can correctly predict any interesting language consequences of complete computational medium change.
Let’s start with “changes as they always occured”.
If we look at long-term available history, there are examples of cyclical change in grammar structure. The simplest example Zaliznyak gives in his lecture about this is that will got shortened to ’ll and it slowly becomes a prefix signifying future tense.
Also, historically, pronounciation caused orphography changes -different in different in partially isolated populations, of course. Also, borrowing, mangling and direct invention of words occured in such populations separately, of course.
What can we look at now? It looks like geographical closeness can sometimes be a weaker factor than membership in some subculture or online community from the language change point of view. Of course, earlier there were some language changes specific to a single proffession or social stratum; nowadays one person can participate in more language enironments that should reduce isolation but make neologism spread faster.
Acceleration of technological changes and social changes these technological changes bring increases the amount of new notions—and words—that have to be created as an expansion of language, not as size-preserving change. On the other hand, looking up a new word you encounter is easier, and at the same time some old notions become obsolete. This should increase the speed of vocabulary update; it may bring some unforeseen changes, but for me these are unknown unknowns.
The idea that written text is used for real-time communication is relatively new and already leads to sloppy orthography. So oral speech is probavly losing its role of change driver.
What more radical changes can occur?
If the speech is a means of human communication, it should be a relatively rapid stream of patterns in space and time.
It is likely that soones or later (decades timescale) large amount of mobile electronics can make practical using some other senses for communications. For example, it may turn out that reusing sense of touch is better because it doesn’t have to leak (as sound does) and doesn’t require focusing (as sight does).
A known unknown that can change grammatical structure of speech is computer language processing. I cannot predict what it will achieve, but every change in its capablities can significantly affect language. Fo example, ones automatic translation beats some threshold, some people will construct texts that are intentionally easier—or intentionally harder—to translate automatically.