3 ms·
English is dominant now, and as you say history shows the dominant lingua francas changes over time - all the time. But I don't think another existing nation's
by flurdy 7y ago
English is dominant now, and as you say history shows the dominant lingua francas changes over time - all the time. But I don't think another existing nation's language will take over. Not Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, etc. Instead, I think an evolved version of English will dominate in 100-200 years time.
We already have many localised Englishes across the world, American, Australian, Indian, various pidgin English, but also in politics, business, social media there are "New Speak" version of English in those contexts.
One of these will evolve to be the lingua franca of the young connected people and dominate. And then be superseded by the next evolved language.
Once we colonize Mars and elsewhere there will be some interesting forks in languages I am sure.
- johnzim 7y agoI agree. Globish is already iterating on itself so fast I don't think it'll be beat.
- ruiseal 7y agoLang Belta is a fun one.
- learner124 7y agoI think spanish and English could end up merging in some ways honestly. There's already so many words of similar origin, geographical proximity in the Americas and already the phenomenon of Spanglish has existed a long time. I think it would take at least a few hundred years though.
- asveikau 7y agoImportant to note that this has probably happened before with other popular languages. The way you describe the hypothetical future of English sounds a lot like you could be talking about Latin. The phrase lingua franca itself came about to describe a very similar story.