Complexity comes from languages that arise in isolation. Basically, the fewer people speak a language, the less chance its natural complexity will degrade. Inva

Complexity comes from languages that arise in isolation. Basically, the fewer people speak a language, the less chance its natural complexity will degrade. Invasions and other interlinguistic contact create simplifications, most visibly pidgins and creoles. Check out Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by Ian McWhorter, which shows how English underwent this very process. What we speak today is a hilarious pidgin of Old English and Norman French, which are themselves mashups. I wonder what will win: practically no new natural languages are being created, so simplification is running amok, but invasions are now rare, and we use computers almost exclusively in our own native tongues. Maybe we end up suffering global economic collapse and reverting to the natural language wars.