The Future of English?

Brian’s post — and Roboseyo’s comment appended to it — reminded me of a subject I haven’t yet posted about but have sometimes thought of discussing here. That is, the way SF authors imagine the future of the English language. This is a subject of particular interest to me, since I’m kind of working my way over to looking at SF in non-Anglophone societies, where the role of English-as-medium and English-as-culture impacts what non-Anglophones do (or don’t do) with SF as a literary genre.

Of course, for a long time, many Anglophone writers simply assumed that the dominance of America and of the English language would go hand in hand. If you look at a lot of older SF, you see that assumption — hand-in-tentacle (or choose another member, if you prefer) with the assumed dominance of white males — runs deep within the genre.

Even there, of course, there was some projection about the future of the language. As far back as the days of Gernsback’s pulps, authors have been throwing neologisms into the mix. (I’m not so sure about before that, though you can see it is a fair bit less common in, say, the works of H.G. Wells or Jules Verne.)

Neologism — the coining of new, imaginary words for new, imaginary things — is a major feature of contemporary SF, but the thing is, when you sit back and think about it, it’s not used to convey linguistic change of the kind that actual linguists talk about. Like, for example, the Great Vowel Shift? That sort of thing is totally filtered out of most SF, so that when linguistic change actually takes center stage, this fact becomes starkly apparent. The best known example of this is Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, a novel set in a post-nuclear holocaust Britain, millennia after the final war, where civilization has collapsed completely (and language along with it). Here’s the opening of the novel, taken from a comment by Hoban himself on how he came to write that way:

On my naming day when I come 12 1 gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing Ue that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyrd he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and there we wer then. Him on I end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, ‘Your tern now my tern later.’ The other spears gone in then and he wer dead and the steam coming up off him in the rain and we all yelt, ‘Offert!’

The woal thing fealt jus that littl bit stupid. Us running that boar thru that las littl scrump of woodling with the forms all roun. Cows mooing sheap baaing cocks crowing and us foraging our las boar in a thin grey girzel on the day I come a man.

It’s not so rough when you read only a few paragraphs, but after a while you start to feel like you’re reading Middle English. It’s parseable, but just barely. This makes the book a very unusual specimen: most SF novels don’t actually fictionalize the extrapolation of linguistic change in this way. People ten thousand years from now, and aliens, are often depicted speaking modern English, but with other stuff thrown in.

This is mainly for convenience, though in cases where people from the deep future — say, time travelers — speak perfect 20th century American English once they’ve arrived in the past, it’s a cheap, lazy, and annoying oversight. But in the majority of cases, people would not be willing to read a book with all the dialog written in a barely understandable language, so authors rarely have any other choice (or inclination), and where the story is set in the deep future, or even the near future, it’s actually quite natural to tell it in modern English, with changes thrown in where appropriate. (It’s as natural as rendering conversations held in a foreign language in English when speaking to Anglophones.)

The point, though, is that neologisms in such stories actually punctuate points of difference from the (real-world) present time. In other words, it’s kind of like how Westerners in Korea will throw in words like ajumma or soju without stopping and explicitly explaining their meaning as they tell stories about Korea… or, how writers like Kipling made a habit of tossing in a few non-English words to color the setting and give the story an exotic flavour. (No mistake, mentioning Kipling, as his effect on early SF was arguably significant. There’s even an anthology of Kipling’s SF out there, though I haven’t gotten my greedy hands on it yet!)

One of the most neologism-heavy books ever written is John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, a fascinating novel by an amazing British novelist. (Brunner is often credited as the guy who seems first to have envisioned computer viruses, if you can imagine that, in another novel titled The Shockwave Rider. He calls them something “worms”, actually.) Anyway, I remember reading a paper on neologism in Science Fiction Studies years ago, which broke down the usage of neologism in a group of novels. What it found was unusurprising: the overwhelming majority of neologisms in SF are for nouns, especially objects (as opposed to people and places). Hail, Gernsback: they’re often gadgets. A familiar example from Star Trek is the “dilithium crystal.” What is a dilithium crystal? It’s a whoozit whatsit gadget. A future-object in need of a (scientific-sounding) name.

Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, though, took this trend to a new height, using the biggest pool of neologisms including nouns for people, nouns for places, verbs, and adjectives (if not adverbs — I can’t remember, and I can’t find the paper online at the moment). A couple of examples mentioned in the book’s page at Wikipedia include:

“codder” (man), “shiggy” (woman), “whereinole” (where in hell?), “prowlie” (an armored police car), “offyourass” (possessing an attitude) and “mucker” (a person running amok). A new technology introduced is “eptification” (education for particular tasks), a form of mental programming.

I really wish I had the paper on hand, as there are some fascinating charts indexing the use of types of neologisms and so on. Granted, some of Brunner’s coinages don’t quite ring true —  they don’t sound, to my 80s/90s-raised ears, like words people would actually fall into using — but they do paint a really vivid image of a world stretched to the seams. (And a book that is outstanding for more than just this: its use of the “Innis Mode” of jumpcuts between characters in a huge cast, its constant quotes from the very entertaining (fictional) books of Chad C. Mulligan, and the quality of intensity, storytelling, and imagination behind it all make it a masterpiece.)

In more recent work, a few more interesting discussions of the fate of English itself come to mind. One is more common, and has appeared in a number of books, though perhaps because of its (acknowledged) indebtedness to Stand on Zanzibar, David Brin’s Earth comes to mind. Again, I haven’t got the book on hand, but I recall that in an early scene, a major character is talking to a minor one in a dialect of English that is called “Simglish,” for “Simplified English.” The notion is that, in order to facilitate the learning of English, a consciously modified form of the language, with greater regularization and simplification, is developed in order to make its acquisition by nonnative speakers easier.

Which, again, is something Roboseyo mentions specifically in his comment. He links it to the decline of American power in a world where English has achieved enough penetration or standardization as the lingua franca to drown out any incentive that might exist in promoting another language — say, Mandarin Chinese — to displace it, the way English did French. (And there are SFnal futures where Mandarin does become the new lingua franca, or at least the language of the elite. I seem to remember skill at Mandarin being an important part of elite life in the Chinese-dominated world of Maureen McHugh’s brilliant China Mountain Zhang. Not that Americans can’t/don’t speak English anymore, but if you want to get a good education, you need to go to Beijing, and for that…)

Another alternative, though, is that English languishes on into the future as it is. This is something I see more easily happening, since I foresee a lack of incentive to simplify English on the part of both Anglophones and non-Anglophones. That is, Anglophones would probably feel just as uneasy about this as people from other cultures would feel about meddling Anglophones coming in and “fixing” their languages to make them easier to learn, while the English-capable elites in non-Anglophone countries actually value the difficulty of acquiring the English language; it’s one of those things that keeps them on top, at least in certain societies, Korea among them. (Can you imagine the reaction of Korean elites if Simglish were to supplant English on the college entrance exams?) So I really don’t think any substantial, “official” form of simplified English as a global auxiliary language will emerge, though creoles and dialects (like those we see in India or or the Caribbean) certainly could.

In such a world, though, there’s another, gloomier possibility, which is that English, in languishing on, is impacted by its role as a global language. In Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire — which, like the other novels mentioned above, is among my favorites — there are two interesting things I remember. One is the impact of political correctness on English, wherein somewhere along the way, Anglophones have stopped using our old-fashioned Anglophone names for countries and started using the native terms used by people from those countries. (In other words, we’d be calling Korea “Daehan Mingook” or “Hangook” instead of “South Korea” or “The Republic of Korea.”

Then there’s the effect on English itself of its role as lingua franca, most stunningly put forth in a comment by a poet of Eastern-European origin (I can’t remember which country he’s from) about how there’s no more poetry written in English, because of how “all the poetry simply fell out of the bottom of the language” (or something like that — this is a paraphrase) as a result of its being the lingua franca for so long. I really wish I could quote the line, but I haven’t got the book here in Korea with me. (Though if someone gives me the line, I’d be happy to edit it in here. Same for any other quotes you might want to work in.)

An interesting example of a rather different lingua franca appeared in the film Code 46, where the standard language is basically English, but with a mishmash of other languages ground deeply in. (Wikipedia lists “English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Italian, Urdu and Mandarin,” for the record.) On some level, I thought this “global pidgin” was more about styling the film, but there is at least a little reason for it: the film describes a world where globalization has been carried to its extreme in a number of different ways, including scenes of all white (ie. European-descended) factory workers in China and strict emigration rules because of global health management concerns.

In the longer term, the visions tend towards the leveling of language as a medium for communication. Just as literacy goes out the window in Holy Fire (the neo-young protagonist marvels at the idleness of youths sitting around and reading paper books in Europe), in the long run technology trumps the inefficiency of language, as foreign tongues can be either uploaded into minds, or acquired at great speed, or, in my favorite imaginings of the future by Greg Egan, technological retooling of the human species makes the universalization of language possible, for example in Diaspora where the uploaded consciousnesses and computer-spawned AIs are all speaking the same language as a matter of course.

Sure, in the same novel, differences of language between homo sapiens are nothing compared to the differences of language and difficulties of communication between different self-modified clades of posthumans. Diaspora has a fascinating little section on the diversity of human subspecies and how communication between then, as a matter of communication between radically different minds in radically different brains, requires intermediaries who bridge those psychobiological differences. But in other texts by Egan, the universality of language as a medium for communication is assumed — once we’re uploaded, language translation and language access become trivially easy unless one consciously attempts to make it difficult. (Say, by confessing love in the form of an obscure mathematical analogy.)

The elimination of all barriers to communication is, of course, a powerfully utopian vision, though one that feels particularly white/western to me: for many people in our world, language is an important part of their identity, and the crucible of their culture. If language barriers are leveled, what happens to culture barriers? Or subcultural barriers, for in Egan’s postbiological worlds we find a profusion of different sects, groups, and other organizations who sometimes go so far as to retool their own consciousnesses to believe, behave, or think in specific, and nonstandard, ways. The “universal” is something that any well-trained reader immediately looks warily upon: is the universal simply the “naturalized” white, Western value set? Or are cognitive-cultural constructs integrated into the “universal” language so that they are immediately comprehensible to all? Or does temporary (or permanent) self-modification become a part of what it means to speak and to hear others’ “languages”?

To Egan’s credit, he doesn’t quite simplify these things: he postulates that “languages” or voluntary states of thought will differ so radically — much more radically than is possible among humans with the same basic hardware — that communication will only be possible when easy, quick self-modification is possible. (Something akin to installing a plugin on your mind so you can understand what some deeply self-modified mind or group of minds is thinking.) He doesn’t whiten or simplify things, and in fact, in some ways, he recomplexifies them by showing just how much more pronounced differences can be once humans are in conscious control of their cognitive and biological hardware. (Another example, in Schild’s Ladder, involves what amounts to the complete and total on the fly customization of human sexual reproduction, so that partners voluntarily, and unconsciously, self-modify so as to fit one another perfectly, but in a way that makes traditional notions of “sex” and “gender” quite, er, inapplicable.) But this is an awareness and sensitivity I think is perhaps less pronounced in other works where communication across languages is automated.

In any case, this discussion of the future of English in science-fiction is far from exhaustive. What are some of the futures of the English language that have surprised you most in SF novels you’ve read? Or, if you’re an English teacher and not an SF fan (or are both) what do you think the fate of English is going to be in the next century or two? This is one of those cases where the SF and the Korean/TEFL sides of my blog can actually intersect, so I’m quite curious about what various readers will have to say!

And by the way, I’m aware that I’ve left out another fascinating branch of SF, which is, tales in which alien languages are learned by human beings. It seems tangential here, but it is nonetheless fascinating. If you’re interested in that, then as a starting point I recommend Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. (No, the link is not to the story, which is not available free online, though a few others are. But hell, buy the book, Ted deserves the royalties!) Oh, and if you prefer reading it in Korean translation — or giving one of the best SF collections of the last ten years to a Korean you think will like it — it’s available here, too. (A good translation, as well, says Lime.)

If you’re too cheap for that, you [redacted], you could always try H. Beam Piper’s short story “Omnilingual” which is free in many formats here.

But wait, before you go off, really: share your thoughts on this topic!

13 thoughts on “The Future of English?

  1. The context by which language mutates is missing. it’s unclear just what you are describing in your examples also.

    Konglish is a humorous pidgin that could with time and increased trade become a creole. But, if autarky takes over in the distant future it’s unlikely even a pidgin could supplant a dialect. So, either you are describing new pidgins forming into creoles based on closer cooperation and contact, or predicting some disaster leading to dialects forming or reverting into into “new” languages. Foreign vocabulary might infuse dialects, but will not change their grammatical structure.

  2. Fascinating.

    I’m worried about what’s going to happen with “Battlestar Galactica,” now that the fleet– which speaks (for the most part) modern American English– has found Earth, and is likely to find some of its inhabitants. There appear to be hints that the Earthfolk speak English. How sad.

    One thing I enjoyed about the Star Wars universe was its polyglot nature: aliens jabbered in their own tongue and assumed that humans would understand them. Humans would respond in English on the assumption that the aliens would understand them. The relaxed vibe, so similar to actual polyglot situations in our own universe (cf. married couples from different language backgrounds who know enough of each other’s languages to speak only their own language and be understood), was appealing.

    Kevin

  3. Baltimoron,

    Huh? That was… er, bewildering. I mean, there are all kinds of contexts, right? And I’ve highlighted a few: social change, technological change, prolonged use as a lingua franca, conscious modification. Could you be more specific in which examples you think are unclear, and why? Because I fail to see what I’m missing short of writing three times what I’ve written above, to spell out the completely obvious!

    As for Konglish, I agree that it’s unlikely to become a creole or dialect among Koreans. I do wonder what kind of pidgin/creole of English and Korea we’ll be seeing arise among non-Koreans who emigrate to (and stay in) Korea, though; given that a number of them come here multilingual, but — at least for migrant workers — usually favoring English and unlikely to master Korean as (working) adults. If foreign workers ever start settling here in large enough numbers, that is.

    Kevin,

    I haven’t been following that show, though I think I watched all of Season 1. Aren’t the people in the fleet from, like, a totally different world? How the hell are they speaking the same language?

    And yes, though I was never a fan of Trek, I did appreciate the polyglot/multicultural side of the universe it depicts.

    (Though again, it was weirdly human/Westerner-centric. Why would Klingons claim Shakespeare as a Klingon, but not some martial Chinese poet? … or even the text of the Mahabharata, which I suspect would be very appealing to Klingons! Their “human envy” and the specifically Western choice of appropriation both scream human-centrism: the kind of fantasy humans would have, where an alien species would envy them their finest creations… finest being, of course, predictably European.)

    (Though of course the reason it’s Shakespeare is because the gag won’t work if a Klingon claims the Mahabharata or the poems of some Chinese poet nobody’s ever heard of. Which is why I like literary SF so much more than other forms — you can get at that sort of thing in a short story, but never in a film or TV show.)

  4. I wonder if Esperanto has a future role rather than English? I know that Harry Harrison mentioned Esperanto from time to time.

  5. Bill,

    I dunno, I kind of doubt it. There’s bound to be more resistance to learning a totally made-up language than some simplified version of the language everyone’s already studying.

    That said, I have a great-grandpa who was very into Esperanto, and even translated poems into the language or something odd like that. I haven’t seen his notebooks for some time now, but they’re kicking around at my mother’s place.

  6. “This is a subject of particular interest to me, since I’m kind of working my way over to looking at SF in non-Anglophone societies, where the role of English-as-medium and English-as-culture impacts what non-Anglophones do (or don’t do) with SF as a literary genre.

    Of course, for a long time, many Anglophone writers simply assumed that the dominance of America and of the English language would go hand in hand.”

    There’s a reason why English is spoken outside of England, and it has to do with the role of language in trade between peoples. But, English itself is a creole that developed its own grammar and became more than Low German, French, and Latin. And, the wars fought in England just to decide who spoke what are also ripe for SF treatment.

    English has also disintegrated into other pidgins, like Konglish and Chinglish, which in the right context could be the germ of new dialects, like proto-French or Proto-Romanian. That assumes the current multilateral economic system is sustained. In that case, Konglish will stay a pidgin between Korean and English for only those who need it. But, if this system is ended, local languages and dialects could reassert themselves, and pidgins would become relics.

    2. Hoban has concocted a pidgin, The vocabulary is imaginative, but the grammar is English. It’s more likely a future English would combine with other languages, like Urdu or Chinese, and then the grammars and vocabulary would combine into something strange.

    3. That English could revert to near-Middle English is not jarring in a dramatic sense, it’s almost reassuring. It’s like saying to people who hate globalization because they lost their jobs and all the movies are made in Japan, “Hey, just wait a little and it will all come back! We’re America, we speak English, and we always will, even if the martians invade!”

    I think if one wants to jar people dramatically about the value of a global culture, one should construct a literary tool like present-day Korean in the DPRK or German in the Nazi years. Purge English of all foreign grammar and vocabulary, and make the characters trip over themselves trying to speak it, and not only die for not getting it right, but lose the ability to make sense to one another. Actually, one couldn’t find a pure English, but that’s not what anti-globalizers want to hear.

    As for alien languages, what about the first human language? Since evidence is lacking, what about creating Cro-Magnon language? Speculating about the future just keeps kicking down the road what’s basically the languages around today. But answering how and why language began might tell humans if we need it, or perhaps it’s an impediment or wrong turn.

    I would argue language is integral to humans as trading economic animals. Without it, then, humans would not need to trade, and politics and economics would be different. And, humans would have created of themselves a new species, an alien by any measure.

  7. I also forgot to argue that the notion of a universal language is akin to the notion of perfect globalization. It’s not a reality, it’s politely an aspiration. Or, for those opposed or skeptical, the triumph of faith over reason. Whether it’s genetic or geographical, division and conflict is integral to humanity.

  8. I live in London and if anyone says to me “everyone speaks English” my answer is “Listen and look around you”. If people in London do not speak English then the whole question of a global language is completely open.

    The promulgation of English as the World’s “lingua franca” is unethical and linguistically undemocratic. I say this as a native English speaker!

    Mandarin Chinese is attempting to dominate as a global language as well.

    The long-term solution must be found and a non-national language, which places all ethnic languages on an equal footing is long overdue,and I agree with the Esperanto suggestion.

    An interesting video can be seen at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU Professor Piron was a former translator with the United Nations

    A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net

  9. Kevin:

    For all you said, that’s why I liked reading “Black Robe”. The film somehow lost something not offering interior monologues. The dangerous and humorous ways words and behavior mixed is the closest in print I’ve seen to my own experiences.

    What about Babylon 5? I think it offers another explanation that applies to both ST and SW. In all three universes, aliens have extensive diplomatic contact with each other for various periods of time. There would be time for many people to pick up varying amounts of proficiency in other languages. But, peoples, like the Vorlons, or those insectoid creatures whose name I can’t recall, needed translation interfaces, because of some deliberate policy.

    But, usually, in first contact situations, there would be some artificial interface or initial period of confusion, whether humorous or dangerous. ST: Enterprise portrayed that well, by including a top linguist in the bridge crew.

  10. Baltimoron,

    There’s a reason why English is spoken outside of England, and it has to do with the role of language in trade between peoples.

    Yeah, like I said, the obvious. But the permanence of American dominance into the 30th century was always something that struck me as, er, a failure of the imagination in so much American SF.

    And, the wars fought in England just to decide who spoke what are also ripe for SF treatment.

    That I can’t so much see. Though I can see platform wars, where massive intergalactic proxy wars (fought with destructive data streams) rage over which communications protocols are to be used in the galactic message boards. It’d work as backstory, anyway.

    English has also disintegrated into other pidgins, like Konglish and Chinglish, which in the right context could be the germ of new dialects, like proto-French or Proto-Romanian. That assumes the current multilateral economic system is sustained. In that case, Konglish will stay a pidgin between Korean and English for only those who need it. But, if this system is ended, local languages and dialects could reassert themselves, and pidgins would become relics.

    Well, and this is complex; it depends on how the systems are ended, and what is prioritized thereafter, what would happen to languages. For example, if our economics falls apart but somehow we remain wired — if we forge some kind of some kind of bright green technosociety — then I imagine the dominance of a single, alphabetic language would continue, probably English, but with all kinds of variants arising, in the wired class, with local dialects being used by the less-wired or non-wired, if such classes exist.

    Hoban has concocted a pidgin, The vocabulary is imaginative, but the grammar is English. It’s more likely a future English would combine with other languages, like Urdu or Chinese, and then the grammars and vocabulary would combine into something strange.

    It’s highly unlikely in the wake of a civilization-crushing nuclear war and a long, protracted collapse of civilization to the point described in the novel — where dogs are invariably wild and perceived as threats, where shamanism is as close to science as most people get, and where people live short, miserable lives of filthy suffering, that sustained contact with outsider groups would happen enough for Chinese or Urdu to have much effect on English. And as for this:

    That English could revert to near-Middle English is not jarring in a dramatic sense, it’s almost reassuring…

    Yeah, I don’t think that’s how it comes across in the book at all. Though speaking of regression is of course to imply a telelogy, there’s a dramatic effect in having English regress to a form like it had in the dark ages. It’s an impression of collapse, of brutalization, of decivilization, and of inescapable crudeness. I think that’s pretty clear when reading the novel.

    I think if one wants to jar people dramatically about the value of a global culture, one should construct a literary tool like present-day Korean in the DPRK or German in the Nazi years. Purge English of all foreign grammar and vocabulary, and make the characters trip over themselves trying to speak it, and not only die for not getting it right, but lose the ability to make sense to one another. Actually, one couldn’t find a pure English, but that’s not what anti-globalizers want to hear.

    That might work in satire, but it’d be hard to do more than a short story with the idea… incomprehensibility becomes a bit tedious, and besides, people would start expecting Julia to show up. (After all, Orwell has somewhat already mined out this vein, hasn’t he? That seems to me the point of Newspeak and Doublethink.)

    As for alien languages, what about the first human language?

    Well, yeah, that’s interesting, and I imagine it’s come up a few times — certain authors like Stephen Baxter are fascinated with early hominids — but the neat thing about alien languages or communication systems is that their psychologies are assumably so alien that they’re fundamentally nonhuman. So, like, every Earth language has a range of temperatures, hot, warm, cool, cold, etc. But what if some alien species had no sense of temperature, and could not be affected by heat or cold, and had no words for it? It’s a silly example, but the more alien a psychology or biopsychology you imagine, the weirder the language gets. (The Ted Chiang story mentioned is an excellent example of this.)

    I agree about the idea that language is a fundamental element of human sociality — evolved human sociality, actually. Before “trading” even enters the picture, the hardware for language is wired and in operation. Hunting, mating… gregariousness of the kind of complexity that we’ve had since we were human requires communication and abstract thought. So I think language is more fundamental than even just our politics: it’s shaped our psychology, neurology, and our physiology in important ways.

    I also forgot to argue that the notion of a universal language is akin to the notion of perfect globalization. It’s not a reality, it’s politely an aspiration. Or, for those opposed or skeptical, the triumph of faith over reason. Whether it’s genetic or geographical, division and conflict is integral to humanity.

    Ah, but if language allowed us to make a new species of ourselves, then surely it can continue to do so… via the abstraction and scientific thought it obtains us, we can remake ourselves. (Cf. Stand on Zanzibar.) This is the thing: what is fundamental to being human isn’t by definitely untouchable: everything is subject to change. Of course strife will probably continue to exist, but it may not have a linguistic expression in the long run, depending on how we self-modify. (Though even though, varieties of self-modification may make various “congitive template receptors” mutually inaccessible, with Egan-styled temporary self-mods necessary to facilitate comprehension of the other’s message.)

    I only watched a few episodes of B5 back in the day, but I am skeptical about artificial interfaces in First Contact, unless of course it’s premeditated, long-deferred first contact. I suspect real First Contact, should it ever happen, will be only a message, with no aliens. The medium will indeed be the message.

    Brian,

    Of course not everyone speaks English. I live in Korea, by the way, where most people don’t speak much (if any) English. But the infrastructure for using English as a lingua franca seems pretty solidly anchored at the moment. The net, the dominant pop culture, and more are all in English, plus it is the second language of millions of people.

    I just doubt that many people will be willing even to consider Esperanto.

    Linguistic democracy is not quite realistic, is it, given that circumstance? I mean, millions of people have studied to learn English. Millions more are studying it now. They’re voting with their study time and tuition fees. It’d be nice if a simple, easy artificial language were a realistic option, but alas I think neither Anglophones (complacent and lazy as we are) nor non-Anglophones (who’ve invested so much in pursuing English, as well as other foreign languages) will be willing to consider Esperanto seriously.

    (EDIT: Though I should add that this is one of the impediments I see to Chinese taking over: it’s not alphabetical, and when rendered in pinyin it’s not very natural for native Chinese speakers/readers to read. Meanwhile, the business/political elite in India, the other rising star, is pretty fluent in English. So I suspect English will remain in place for some time, and Esperanto has very little competitive power against it. That said, I don’t think the dominance of English is totally linked to American primacy anymore… by now, it seems more like pragmatism. Especially given how much of our technical and scientific infrastructure is saturated with English.)

  11. I have to admit that, literary examples aside, I always imagined the future of English (as I am not qualified to imagine the future of other languages) to be as full of creoles and pidgins and dialects as the present, and whatever other (perhaps marginalizing )words people have for ways of communicating that use bits of English grammar or some English words.
    That said, I find myself wondering if it will go the way of other languages which have been dominant and lost their dominance, like Latin or French or…well, I can’t find another example because all the language trees that go far back enough have notional names for posited ancestral root tongues, since human languages tend to diverge.

    I think it will depend on what methods of communication and transportation we use, what effect climate change has on our mobility.

    If social circumstances remain essentially as they are, I think we’ll get some neologisms but have no major grammatical shifts. If environmental or social change causes isolation or further globalism, we may get more loan words.

    I wish I were a linguist…I have to admit I see this as a hard sf theme now that I think about it.

    Hmm, perhaps someone has written a paper on it….

  12. and perhaps there will be an influx of new words into English should things remain the same, since more Anglophones are studying other languages now I bet….then again I’m skewed because I have reasons to need to learn more languages (two I’ve worked on and two I want to learn); a lot of Anglophones don’t have obvious ones.

    Hmm. I’m sure there are lots of novels where it is advantageous to learn Chinese.

  13. V,

    Yeah, I image creoles and pidgins, but probably fewer of them. (Mass media has a way of evening things out.)

    Chinese is an interesting alternative case of lost dominance: its remnants saturate East Asian languages. Korean’s full of Chinese words, and well-educated Koreans can read Chinese characters (or the Korean form of them, anyway, which involves subtle differences.) Japan still uses those characters, and the vocabulary has affected lots of other local languages. Yet Chinese (let’s say Mandarin) remains a major world language, a living language, and is changing even now. I suspect that’s probably a likelier route for English than the route taken by Latin.

    I think it will depend on what methods of communication and transportation we use, what effect climate change has on our mobility…

    … as well as our literacy (and whether we continue to read as much, or go straight into leveled-flat mediated landscapes), and geopolitics could also come into play.

    I’m curious how more loan words would come about in isolation? I’d imagine fewer would. Meanwhile, I agree: I don’t think grammar’s likely to change except the way it has been all along — mostly simplifying inch by inch.

    I do think language could be a hard SF theme. I don’t know how often it’s been trated that way, but it certainly could be. You’d have to think hard to find a plot that would work, beyond the stories I’ve mentioned.

    Oh, and influx based on Anglophones studying foreign languages? I think if there are lots of Anglophones living immersed in other countries where foreign languages dominate, this might happen. (For example, if large numbers of upper-middle and middle-class Americans were to go expat, they might pick up words and phrases. I’m not sure it’d enter so much from study, but immersion drives certain words deep into your brain.

    (The example I gave in the post, ajumma, is one that even expats who can’t speak a lick of Korean all know.)

    It’d be quite a feat to create a world in which the mobility of workers and the desirability of offshored jobs match, so that Joe Computer Engineer and AT&T can meet up in Indonesia, but if you imagine protracted economic collapse in the US, a continuation of the rise of theocratic nutters, and maybe throw in a little more general violent mayhem by terrorists both domestic and foreign alike, I think you’d have a situation where you might find Marathi, Balinese, or Hokkien words entering English slowly, on the margins, and then becoming entrenched.

    Hmm. I’m sure there are lots of novels where it is advantageous to learn Chinese.

    Probably, though the only ones that come to mind at the moment are McHugh’s (mentioned in the post) and — I imagine — that series by David Wingrove, Chung Kuo, which I haven’t read but which is set in a world dominated by China. (Though in that case, China’s already dominant. I assume everyone speaks Chinese in that world.

    I think there’s probably a good hunk of cyberpunk in which Japanese was the language to learn, mind you. Funny how quick most of SF got over that, yet how for some the fascination lives on and on…

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