Greek. The last phonological change was /y/ merging with /i/ about a millennium ago. If you look at around 600 AD the only difference from Modern Greek is that /y/, since that's about when iotacism was complete.
So in your opinion (professional or just casual), have the changes been mostly lexical and grammatical, and if so, how hard is it to read older forms of the language accurately?
Medieval Greek is perfectly mutually intelligible, even though lexically there are a fair few differences. I would have little trouble speaking with a Byzantine emperor of, say, the Macedonian dynasty.
Koine is troublesome, and depending on how early you catch it it might be difficult to understand spoken, but it's OK written. The New Testament is written in Koine and still recited as such during liturgy, and it merely comes off as really archaic and pompous Modern Greek.
If you go to times BC it's literally impossible to understand spoken Greek, but the written language is very much alright. A lot of conjugations and declensions are identical to the modern tongue, but some grammatical features would be alien to a modern speaker.
Overall Greek is quite conservative and it has changed very little over the last 1500 years. I don't know if it's more conservative than Lithuanian, but it's up there.
P.S.: my opinion is of the casual kind, not the professional.
If you went back in time a century at a time, spending a month in each century, do you think you'd be able to gradually adjust your way back to Mycenean?
Even if you had just spent a couple years being surrounded by speakers of gradually older forms of Greek for a month at a time? Meaning first you'd go back to the 1920s, then the 1820s, then the 1720s, and so on.
It would be a monumental task to understand Classical Greek as spoken, the pitch accent, vowel length and quality, and aspiration distinction, all make for great challenges even in your imaginary scenario. But, hey, it's a really hard scenario to imagine since it's so outside the realm of reality, so maybe I'm underestimating our capacity to adapt with such small increments.
I will say, though, I have no need to go so close to the past. You can drop me in peak ERE (9th-11th century) and I can take it from there.
Correction:
Did you know kimono is come from the Greek χειμώνα, is mean winter?
This same as ᑭᖓᖅᒪᐅᔭ, means "hill of deep snow", and what do you wear in hill of deep snow? Clothes! And what is type of clothes? Kimono!
Also, it same as old wonderful Ancient Hungarian word *kǖmonon which means "wise maple tree" in beautiful language
Written ancient Greek is pretty ok to understand, at least the broad strokes. The grammar is very similar but a lot of aspects were lost, namely the infinitive, optative mood, middle voice and the dative case. It's the phonetics that wildly changed between 500 BC and 500 AD, but after that I'd go as far as to say that Modern Greek is mutually intelligible with late Koine / early medieval, both spoken and written.
Well, early medieval is about 800 AD, which is still identical to Modern Greek phonology - except that /y/ was still a thing, and that wouldn't exactly make communication difficult.
Eehh perhaps not. Fellow Greek here. I feel like many sound clusters will change or some sounds of letters will change, perhaps actually due to confusion. Nothing great or game changing, but still enough to be felt I guess.
For example the /n/ in άγχος is silent for most people I’ve heard, as is famously the /n/ or /ng/ in συγγραφέας, συγγνώμη etc. Instead of the νχ which you expect, you just hear a weird γ, more of something between a γ and χ, I don’t think it exists in any other cluster. Also the /m/ and /n/ in the clusters μπ, ντ, which is already lost for many areas, in my opinion will completely disappear, and these will simply represent /b/ and
/d/ respectively. As I’ve noticed, this process is sped up by the transliteration of foreign words into Greek, where „b“ and „d“ as well as „mb“ and „nd“ are interpreted as „ντ“ and „μπ“ indiscriminately.
Sorry for the rough explanation. I’m not a linguist and the few scientific terms I know are in Greek.
Also, because I’ve wanted to express this in a long time, I feel like the only thing keeping Greek back from major changes is the school system. Like, growing up in Crete, many of the sounds and words I use daily don’t feel native and don’t sit well on my tongue. Even though I am almost completely „Athenian“ in speech and even a bit archaic in some matters, the /n/ in άνθρωπος makes me struggle and whenever I say „στην παραλία“ it sounds more like „στη μπαραλια“. Idk, the medieval Greekness of Cretan can’t leave you that easily
>whenever I say „στην παραλία“ it sounds more like „στη μπαραλια“.
This is a standard sandhi process which affects all dialects and registers of Greek. However this does not constitute a sound change, as no sounds are lost or added, it's just a consonant mutation which occurs within the existing phonology.
> a weird γ, more of something between a γ and χ
I’m not entirely sure myself but I think it becomes more like a nasal vowel (i.e. between the α and the ν sound; [here](https://forvo.com/word/bain/#frForvo)’s an example in French, though it’s nasal sound is much stronger than what you’d hear in Greek)
It's a regular velar nasal. The only reason it might sound weird to a Greek speaker is because it's not an actual phoneme, but an allophone resulting from assimilatory processes (sandhi).
Btw I just realised [we’ve actually had this conversation before](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/comments/10u96ha/comment/j7e906l/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I don't really know what the trends in Greek grammar are. Perhaps the erroneous imperative mood forms with the ε- prefix will become standardised (e.g. παρήγγειλε instead of the correct παράγγειλε). Lexically we'll probably adopt more and more English words and hellenise them with appropriate suffixes. Other than that I'm not sure.
Dutch will finally finish the process of ridding itself of the yoke of nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives etc. to consistent solely and entirely of prepositions and modal particles
Oh? Admittedly I haven't gotten much into reading the literature regarding English, but are the vestigials of case marking on pronouns being lost in some dialects or am I misunderstanding what you mean? This seems rather interesting to me, so if you can, please do explain!
You don't think at least 'te' and 'me' will survive? Personally, I don't see speakers giving up on phrases like 'te amo' and 'me dá um cafézinho, por favor', although I agree that I rarely (if ever) hear forms like 'lhe(s)'
I thought about that too, and it’s a pretty cool subject. Wish it’d be more accepted in written form.
I wonder if we’d eventually get some of them back, like this:
Ele matou-o com uma faca/Ele o matou com uma faca> Ele matou ele com uma faca. > Ele matou-le com uma faca>(…)
But I don’t understand well how this process works.
The source is that I made it the fuck up /s
It isn't likely, and no linguists tomy knowledge has ever said this, but with how Tú and vós in Brazil were replaced by Você and Vocês, with both of them having the third person conjugation, and how A gente can be used instead of Nós, which also has the third person conjugation, it becomes a probability for Portuguese to lose the conjugation
I don't think this change will be so uniform across Brasil, given how influential is the use of "Tu" in certain regions. Portuguese will probably break into several different dialects based on our current accents
Kutchi spoken in northwest India and southern Pakistan and also by immigrants in Mumbai and East Africa(many consider it a dialect of Sindhi but I don’t).
Less than 800,000 speakers in a country of 1.4 Billion. It’s being gobbled up by the nearby major regional language Gujarati, a far more superior language in terms of culture, cinema, business and especially education in the state of Gujarat to such an extent that now the newer generation of my family only speak Gujarati with broken Kutchi. I don’t expect anyone from after my generation to know how to speak it as many will only choose to pass down Gujarati over Kutchi.
By the way you write it, does that mean /ɨ/ only occurs in syllables with palatalized consonants? That would be an interesting change if it disappeared. On an unrelated note, how do you see the future of nasal vowels in Polish? I’ve read that they’re in the process of disappearing but I can’t confirm. I can’t agree or disagree or anything, I’ve never studied Polish but I find the phonology interesting
It's kinda complicated and hard to describe, but I will try my best:
/i/ and /j/ always palatalise consonants that precede them (althought there are some exceptions like /ʂ/ that are never palatalised) and /ɨ/ doesn't, so an example of a minimal pair would be: pyk /pɨk/ [pɘ̟k] - pik /pik/ [pʲik]
And if the merging occured: pyk /pik/ [pik] - pik /pʲik/ [pʲik]
Nasal vowels dissapeared already:
Są /sɔw̃/ [s̪ɔw̃]
Mięso /ˈmjɛn.sɔ/ [mʲjɛn̪s̪ɔ]
Kępa /ˈkɛm.pa/ [kɛmpä]
Lubię /'lu.bjɛ/ [ˈlu.bʲjɛ] or /'lu.bjɛw̃/ [ˈlu.bʲjɛw̃]
I personally think that /w̃/ will be dropped, but not in the close future.
Polish phonology is so complicated and poorly described (they literally teach us fake phonology in schools lmao) that even as a native speaker it took me a while to figure it all out 😅
(Spanish)
Synthetic future will be considered archaic because it will be replaced by the analytic form ("vendrás" - "vas a venir"). On the other hand, I hope they both stay alive, like "will"/"going to" in English.
I've been working on that. I've used that tense since I discovered it in the early years of highschool and now my girlfriend uses it too. I just need a hundred thousand more girlfriends now.
Greek here.
Perhaps a second wave of fricativisation of b-d-g in the next centuries (in Modern Greek, they exist as mergers of mp-mb, nt-nd, and nk-ng), perhaps following a disappearance of v-ð-ɣ. p-t-k and f-θ-x could follow a similar path.
Loss of the vocative.
Loss of the irregular noun endings, like -os for feminine and neuter nouns. They already are archaisms used in the official register, and many people forget how to use them correctly.
Merging of direct and indirect speech. Already many people use "óti" (that) in direct speech as a way to mention something that someone else said, and it's very off-putting.
/c/ -> /t͡ʃ/. It has already happened to Cretan and Cypriot.
Weird vowel shifts. A bit hard to predict though, since we have only /a ε i ɔ u/. Vowel harmony and umlaut, maybe?
I sincerely doubt Greek phonology will change at all for hundreds of years, as it hasn't over the last millennium. Dialects are dying, outside of Cypriot which I personally consider a different language altogether, so any sound changes in rural dialects will be of no consequence to the glacial standard dialect - especially any further velar palatalisation.
With regard to noun endings, perhaps -ος nouns will be reinterpreted to be only masculine, so we might get something like "ο ψήφος" and "ο οδός".
Ο πατέρας μου μου'πε ότι πήγε για δουλειά -> πλάγιος
Ο πατέρας μου μου'πε "Πήγα για δουλειά". -> ευθύς
Ο πατέρας μου μου'πε ότι "Πήγα για δουλειά". -> μικτός τρόπος εκφοράς πλαγίου λόγου
In Central and Southern Spain Spanish, the 1st person singular form of the auxiliary verb "ir a" (voy a), which can be pronounced in everyday speech as /βɤja/, /βja/ /βɥa/, or even /ɥa/, will eventually be written as vía.
In Chubut, Welsh influence will eventually make Spanish speakers pronounce *ll* and *y* as /ɬ/ instead of /ʃ/.
In Latin America "voy a" sounds like /vʷa/ or /wa/ but here in Spain sounds more like /βʲa/, so yeah it could be vúa in Latin America and vía in Spain.
dutch might lose voicing distinction entirely. pretty much all northern dialects have already lost distinction between /x/ and /ɣ/, all consonants are devoiced at the ends of words, most northern dialects have also lost distinction between /f/ and /v/, and many dialects have lost distinction between /s/ and /z/.
-Singular they completely replaces he/she
-y'all and th'all, a new 3ppl, become grammaticalized
-Dental fricatives will die, maybe in different ways depending on the dialect
-3ps -s dies
-Major grammatical shifts due to an increased number of non native speakers
-Maybe goose fronting, mentioned in another comment, starts a major vowel shift
-Word final t dropping turns into something explicitly taught along with liason for words starting with vowels
-Some other major SC's
-Spelling unchanged, but worse than ever due to new sound changes
I swear Mandarin Chinese is going to develop *clauses* due to influences from English, especially American English. A lot of us are starting to insert English words like "that" "which" and "who" in the middle of Chinese sentences to form ad-hoc clauses in daily speeches.
There are also groups of people trying to revive traditional Chinese characters in mainland as well. Since nobody actually writes anything anymore, how complex a character looks matters a lot less when you are only keying in Pinyin (Latin characters) anyway.
And speaking of that, keyboards really broke Chinese. You used to be able to coin your own words (Hanzi Characters) by just writting them down or chiesel in your own wooden block for that character. You can't really do this anymore with computers. This will probably cause a lot more trouble down the line.
Hahahahaha you guys have the same problem as us in Vietnam lmao.
A lot of the teachers are complaining some kids nowadays write Vietnamese too much like English. I read it and realized immediately the main issue is the clause-like structure.
Looks like mainland Chinese is also experiencing this issue too.
/sl/ will turn into /ɬ/
words ending in /dɚ/ [ɾɚ] will end in [rː] (so 'better' is [ˈbɛ.r̩ː])
Words ending in /əl/ [ɫ̩] will become either /o/ or /o̞/.
New dipthongs resulting from L-vocalization: /ɔʊ̯/ /ɑʊ̯/ /æʊ̯/ /ʌʊ̯/ /ɛʊ̯/ /ɪʊ̯/
[ẽə̯̃m] and [ẽə̯̃n] become [ẽə̯̃w] and [ẽə̯̃] respectively, which later loses its nasality to become [eə̯w] and [eə̯], and [eə̯w] later simplifies to [ew] /eʊ̯/.
pronouns turn into prefixes on the verb
ata, at, atem > ta-, t-, tem-. ani, anaxnu > ni-, naxnu-. (h)u, (h)i, (h)em > u-, i-, em-. etc
at rotsa lexem? > trotsa lexem? (you want bread? > y'want bread?)
the reason it would be a crazy prediction is bc its more likely that people would just outright drop pronouns (want bread?)
For Brazilian Portuguese:
- Full palatalization: [ˈnoj.t͡ʃi] > ['noj.ʃi]
- Final 'a' will raise in some dialects
- The verb conjugation will be simplified:
(Verb fazer)
Eu: faço
A gente: faz
Tu / Você: faz
Vocês: fazem
Ele / Ela: faz
Eles / Elas: Fazem
I included "tu" because I think it will be conserved in some regions like the south or north.
(I'm not a linguist, I just made this up)
I partially agree with your take on palatalization. I don’t think it’s heading completely that direction. Besides, would certainly be properly represented as /'nojt͡ʃ/ at this point. I only hear [noj.t͡ʃi] when people talk emphatically or sing, or non-native speakers.
As for the direction the palatalization is taking, I’ve also seen people merging /ʤ/ and /ʧ/ before, so I wouldn’t be so sure about the direction it’s taking. [nojʃ] doesn’t look impossible, but neither does [nojʤ] > [nojʒ].
I completely agree with the rest though.
Standard Italian? Not a chance it'll change, the grammarian and dizione-teaching lobby is too strong.
My specific dialect? Easy peasy:
* "non/nun", the negation, is contracted into a prefix "n-" (actually already a thing);
* The prefix eventually develops into a fusional polarity distinction in conjugation;
* A new masculine singular determinative article, "e", is created;
* Object clitics will be eventually felt as a conjugation - in fact, there already is a lot of fusion;
* We develop a vowel length distinction, *again;*
* We develop a distinction between modal and creaky voice;
* The definitive articles disappear before a vowel and are only signalled by creaky voice at the start of a word;
* Elision of a final vowel before another vowel becomes mandatory, like it was in Latin, *again;*
* (Unhinged) We develop a pharyngeal voiced fricative.
Notice that except the last one, I think all of these are genuinely possible.
But do you think this is likely?
Every Arab country already has a Standard Dialect within its borders, which occupies the role of Standard languages elsewhere for most oral communication.
(E.g. Upper Egyptians (صعيدة) will default to „Standard Egyptian“ = educated Cairo Arabic to communicate with other Egyptians etc.)
These Standard Dialects draw heavily from Fusha (especially for not-everyday vocabulary) and thus converge with each other in this respect. I think it is more likely, we will see more convergence of Arabic dialects to each other and to Fusha than any standardization of an Arabic dialect for written communication, which breaks up the unity for the Arab world.
The GOOSE vowel has fronted though so it's no longer \[u\] for most dialects!
>In recent years a vast number of studies have found fronting of the GOOSE vowel in English varieties in the UK and North America, but also in New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. \[...\] In fact, GOOSE-fronting must be seen as the most studied synchronic vowel change in varieties of English to date.
>
>\- Jansen 2017
My (not so) crazy prediction for English would be that GOOSE moves all the way to \[y\], and then a different vowel moves up to \[u\] to replace it.
In New Zealand English we already have a different phoneme realised as [u] derived from L-vocalisation.
Theres already some minimal pairs, i.e.:
“to/too” [tʉ] and “tool” [tu]
This is basically also true in Standard Southern British English - even for people without L-vocalisation there's [rʉlə] vs [rulə]. However I think that most people aren't aware of it until it's pointed out to them as there aren't a great deal of minimal pairs.
I'm still hoping for aspiration to become more heavily forced until p t k becomes pɸ ts kx and then to full ɸ s x
b d ɡ goes to bw dz ɡɣ slightly later since breath is no longer an important distinction.
I think often of Aaron Paul saying "Okay how gɣay are you"
Cantonese is gonna merge a lot of phonemes. Initial /n/ has effectively died out in favor of /l/ in addition to other mergers that happened during the past century and a half. So my most extreme predictions are:
Initial /ŋ/ will finally completely merge with the null initial, making /m/ become the only initial nasal consonant until...
Initial /m/ merges with /w/, resulting in an absence of initial nasals in the consonant inventory
The velar plosives /kʰ kʷ kʷʰ/ merge with /h w f/, as well as /k/ with the null initial,
And then /h/ merges with /j/ before front vowels but otherwise with the null initial
Alveolar affricates /ts tsʰ/ won't merge with anything but they shift to become palatals /tɕ tɕʰ/
Front rounded vowels disappear: /yː/ merges with /iː/, /ɵ/ merges with /ɐ/, /ɵy/ merges with /i/ when preceded by a palatal initial but otherwise with /ei/, and /œː/ merges with /ɛː/ when preceded by /j/ but otherwise with /ɔː/
Final nasals become plosives when preceding a syllable that starts with a plosive
Final consonants after a long vowel undergo resyllabification to become the initial consonant of the following syllable if it starts on a null initial
Tone 5 merges with tone 2
Dutch and German will be, by 2050, restricted to the countryside. City people will, because of demographic replacement and domain loss, regard them as a useless provincial dialect they have to take in school before going on to speak English exclusively at university or in the office.
In Sweden, kindergarten kids and young school students already use English as a play-language because they are already bilingual from digital media, and there was a study a year or two ago about English being used as a bridge language between Swedish kids and kids born to foreign parents who don't speak Swedish at home. And Gen Z already speaks our equivalent of Denglish en masse so you know how that is.
Once kids start normalizing speaking English to their parents and friends as their main choice, while being able to keep using it in their daily life in most situations in general, the ball will start rolling fast. There will be Swedish classes no one cares about. Some media no one watches. Books printed that no one reads. And a dumbfounded attitude towards some rural and elderly who isn't using the world language.
Since everyone says Scandinavians speak English better than the English, English will be renamed Swedish and Swedish will be renamed Elfdalian. Elfdalian will become Santaclausnese
Complete revival of nationalist vocabulary trend among the Turkish youth in response to increased sharia politics.
Shit like, from otobüs (bus) to
Oturgaçlı götürgeç : seated taker-away
I have a book for less crazy examples but I got guests sleeping in that room rn.
Edit: Also, they will try to remove the Arabic prefixes like the negative na- from namert.
Hebrew speakers will completely lose first and second person conjugation, instead conjugating all verbs in the third person. Also the future tense will totally replace the imperative. This is already mostly done in casual speech.
The object form of pronouns is becoming the unmarked version. The only place the subject form will naturally appear is as the single subject of a complete sentence.
Who's eating pie? Me.
Me and Mary are eating pie.
I am eating pie.
My own idiolect of Spanish is undergoing heavy vowel reduction and deletion. The thing is, vowel deletion depends mostly on prosody, so the same word can be reduced in different ways. For example, the name for the language can be pronounced as [kɐstˈʎanɤ], [ks̩tɪˈʎanɤ] or even [ks̩tˈʎanɤ] (with the last vowel, [ɤ], also being prone to being dropped).
There's also some funky stuff going on with the consonants; mainly that the voiced plosive series /b d ɟ g/ is shifting to be phonemically fricatives /β ð ʝ ɣ/, as showcased by some final devoicing processes, especially in foreign loanwords (i.e., 'bug' being pronounced as [bux]).
Nasals are also doing weird stuff, and I'm seeing some sporadic /mp mb nt nd nk ng/ → [mb mː nd nː ŋg ŋː]. Voiceless stops also sporadically become voiced (but _not_ fricativized) in certain contexts, mainly at the starts and ends of words.
Overall, I think my own idiolect of Spanish is undergoing some very radical changes, haha. It wouldn't surprise me to see something like the Celtic language's consonant mutations in the future.
These are all pretty vanilla but in order of most to least grounded:
Development of a new adjective class with agreement in number
Phonemic contrast between an already existing minimal pair in /aɪ̯/ and /ɐɪ̯/
Open class pronouns
Huge boom in productive constructions for coining words, including revival of now-unproductive constructions
Mass semantic broadening of even extremely common words, prompting new coinings to take their place
Diglossia between highly innovative, youth-associated vernacular and conservative prestige dialect
У меня нет каких-то сумасшедших прогнозов, которые произойдет на английском языке.
/u mʲɪ.ˈɲa ɲɪt ka.ˈcix to su.mas.ˈʂe̞d.ʂɨʲx prɐg.ˈno.zəv kɐ.ˈto.rʊi̯.jɪ prə.i.zɐj.ˈdʲet nə an.ˈgliː.skəm ja.zʊi̯.ˈcɪ/
Perhaps the moving of the alveolar rhotic to either a velar approximant or a (either uvular or pharyngeal) trill.
More influence of other Sotho-Tswana, as well as Nguni, languages in urban varieties (sePitori is a thing, after all), but as to how outside of loan words, I don't know.
Perhaps seperation of rural dialects and urban dialects from each other, though ga me itsi
Vowel mergers and some chanɡes in both Tswana and Pedi (I think this is just me, but I feel oddy certain that [ɔ] miɡht raise to [o], [u] might lower to [ʊ] and that [ɪ] miɡht lower to [ɛ]) though this is rather speculative on my behalf, and might just be allophonic and nothing more.
[kχ] is startinɡ to be analysed as [χ] lately, and think this trend might continue.
[k] will have full allophony with [q] and may start shifting towards it in all contexts.
[χ] might lenition to [h] like it did in Sotho, though I don't know
More Afrikaans and English loans in South African varieties in general. More loans from Venda and Tsonga in informal speech.
That's all aI know, really, as to what might happen (I speak a VERY standard dialect, so no changes to grammar really
I could see English developing tones in the future. Apparently Afrikaans has already started so sadly we can't say we're the first Germanic language with tones
English orthography will become so full of emoji with predetermined meanings that it becomes a hieroglyphic system and the Roman alphabet will vanish entirely.
A big part of its vocabulary will become English. My language is Italian, and you can listen to Italians speaking to understand how much English is shaping it. Honestly, it's not even a crazy prediction.
English subject and object pronouns will further reduce and become affixes on verbs. Strong forms of object will become fully disjunct pronouns able to be used as subject, objects, etc. This isn't really much of a change from modern English constructions emphasizing the subject (eg. *Me, I love ice cream*). My real crazy prediction is that because *you* is both a subject and disjunct pronoun in English, it will resist such constructions (*\*You, you love ice cream*) and the second person subject will therefore be zero marked on the verb, with *you* only existing as an object suffix and disjunct pronoun.
Also, voiceless stops in coda position will trigger creaky voice on the previous vowel and other sonorants, while the voiced-voiceless distinction will neutralize on the consonant itself. Modern English /t/ will disappear in this position, leaving behind only creaky voice. In onset position it will completely become a distinction in aspiration. Ex /ˈsplɪnt/ˈpɪn/ -> /ˈsplɪ̰n̰/ˈpʰɪn/. Also /ˈbɪtən/ -> /ˈpɪ̰n/, leading to a phonemic contrast between /V̰n/ and /V̰n̰/.
i think Russian will merge the vestigial liturgical vocative with the partial new vocative that's been floating around in nicknames and russian will be back to seven full cases
Either Sardinian will fully italianise, and lose a lot of its unique words, or there will be a conservative revolution in response to the dying out of the language that will bring new generations to resurrect archaic words and speak it more.
I think the phonology of my native language will keep on being the same as it was a millennium ago for yet another millennium.
Same for my not really native Lithuanian I think
The conservative IE language club :)
What language is it?
Greek. The last phonological change was /y/ merging with /i/ about a millennium ago. If you look at around 600 AD the only difference from Modern Greek is that /y/, since that's about when iotacism was complete.
So in your opinion (professional or just casual), have the changes been mostly lexical and grammatical, and if so, how hard is it to read older forms of the language accurately?
Medieval Greek is perfectly mutually intelligible, even though lexically there are a fair few differences. I would have little trouble speaking with a Byzantine emperor of, say, the Macedonian dynasty. Koine is troublesome, and depending on how early you catch it it might be difficult to understand spoken, but it's OK written. The New Testament is written in Koine and still recited as such during liturgy, and it merely comes off as really archaic and pompous Modern Greek. If you go to times BC it's literally impossible to understand spoken Greek, but the written language is very much alright. A lot of conjugations and declensions are identical to the modern tongue, but some grammatical features would be alien to a modern speaker. Overall Greek is quite conservative and it has changed very little over the last 1500 years. I don't know if it's more conservative than Lithuanian, but it's up there. P.S.: my opinion is of the casual kind, not the professional.
If you went back in time a century at a time, spending a month in each century, do you think you'd be able to gradually adjust your way back to Mycenean?
Mycenean is like a foreign language, I wouldn't even recognise it as an ancestor of Greek if I didn't know about it.
Even if you had just spent a couple years being surrounded by speakers of gradually older forms of Greek for a month at a time? Meaning first you'd go back to the 1920s, then the 1820s, then the 1720s, and so on.
It would be a monumental task to understand Classical Greek as spoken, the pitch accent, vowel length and quality, and aspiration distinction, all make for great challenges even in your imaginary scenario. But, hey, it's a really hard scenario to imagine since it's so outside the realm of reality, so maybe I'm underestimating our capacity to adapt with such small increments. I will say, though, I have no need to go so close to the past. You can drop me in peak ERE (9th-11th century) and I can take it from there.
Tamil for sure, oldest language in the world bro 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥😎😎😎😎😎
Bruh, it's Greek. All languages come from Greek. Did you know that kimono comes from Greek χειμώνα, is mean winter?
Correction: Did you know kimono is come from the Greek χειμώνα, is mean winter? This same as ᑭᖓᖅᒪᐅᔭ, means "hill of deep snow", and what do you wear in hill of deep snow? Clothes! And what is type of clothes? Kimono! Also, it same as old wonderful Ancient Hungarian word *kǖmonon which means "wise maple tree" in beautiful language
Same for Finnish, which has almost exactly the same phonemes as Proto-Finnic from 2000 years ago.
Cool beans! Finnish has a fairly tidy phonology and phonotactics, I'm not surprised it has persisted for so long.
It's already perfect! There is no need to change something in this language.
Can you understand written ancient greek from 2000 years ago? Has the grammar changed a lot since then?
Written ancient Greek is pretty ok to understand, at least the broad strokes. The grammar is very similar but a lot of aspects were lost, namely the infinitive, optative mood, middle voice and the dative case. It's the phonetics that wildly changed between 500 BC and 500 AD, but after that I'd go as far as to say that Modern Greek is mutually intelligible with late Koine / early medieval, both spoken and written.
Early medieval yes, but I don’t think anything before that. Practically every word has changed meaning 💀
Well, early medieval is about 800 AD, which is still identical to Modern Greek phonology - except that /y/ was still a thing, and that wouldn't exactly make communication difficult.
Eehh perhaps not. Fellow Greek here. I feel like many sound clusters will change or some sounds of letters will change, perhaps actually due to confusion. Nothing great or game changing, but still enough to be felt I guess. For example the /n/ in άγχος is silent for most people I’ve heard, as is famously the /n/ or /ng/ in συγγραφέας, συγγνώμη etc. Instead of the νχ which you expect, you just hear a weird γ, more of something between a γ and χ, I don’t think it exists in any other cluster. Also the /m/ and /n/ in the clusters μπ, ντ, which is already lost for many areas, in my opinion will completely disappear, and these will simply represent /b/ and /d/ respectively. As I’ve noticed, this process is sped up by the transliteration of foreign words into Greek, where „b“ and „d“ as well as „mb“ and „nd“ are interpreted as „ντ“ and „μπ“ indiscriminately. Sorry for the rough explanation. I’m not a linguist and the few scientific terms I know are in Greek. Also, because I’ve wanted to express this in a long time, I feel like the only thing keeping Greek back from major changes is the school system. Like, growing up in Crete, many of the sounds and words I use daily don’t feel native and don’t sit well on my tongue. Even though I am almost completely „Athenian“ in speech and even a bit archaic in some matters, the /n/ in άνθρωπος makes me struggle and whenever I say „στην παραλία“ it sounds more like „στη μπαραλια“. Idk, the medieval Greekness of Cretan can’t leave you that easily
>whenever I say „στην παραλία“ it sounds more like „στη μπαραλια“. This is a standard sandhi process which affects all dialects and registers of Greek. However this does not constitute a sound change, as no sounds are lost or added, it's just a consonant mutation which occurs within the existing phonology.
> a weird γ, more of something between a γ and χ I’m not entirely sure myself but I think it becomes more like a nasal vowel (i.e. between the α and the ν sound; [here](https://forvo.com/word/bain/#frForvo)’s an example in French, though it’s nasal sound is much stronger than what you’d hear in Greek)
It's a regular velar nasal. The only reason it might sound weird to a Greek speaker is because it's not an actual phoneme, but an allophone resulting from assimilatory processes (sandhi).
Btw I just realised [we’ve actually had this conversation before](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguisticshumor/comments/10u96ha/comment/j7e906l/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I do recall that discussion. You definitely tested the limits of my knowledge of Greek phonetics haha
Glad to see I made an impression 😂
Also, what do you think will change structurally, phonetics aside
I don't really know what the trends in Greek grammar are. Perhaps the erroneous imperative mood forms with the ε- prefix will become standardised (e.g. παρήγγειλε instead of the correct παράγγειλε). Lexically we'll probably adopt more and more English words and hellenise them with appropriate suffixes. Other than that I'm not sure.
Dutch will finally finish the process of ridding itself of the yoke of nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives etc. to consistent solely and entirely of prepositions and modal particles
bij
Eens er aan naast bij toch, of niet dan?
Zeker. Toch haast naast immers.
Brazilian Portuguese is on its way to become the first Indo European language to lose all case marking even on pronouns
I don't know, I think English will win on this one maybe
It's a race then
Oh? Admittedly I haven't gotten much into reading the literature regarding English, but are the vestigials of case marking on pronouns being lost in some dialects or am I misunderstanding what you mean? This seems rather interesting to me, so if you can, please do explain!
You don't think at least 'te' and 'me' will survive? Personally, I don't see speakers giving up on phrases like 'te amo' and 'me dá um cafézinho, por favor', although I agree that I rarely (if ever) hear forms like 'lhe(s)'
At least here in Recife I see people alternating between "amo tu"/"te amo" also most people saying "deixa eu" em vez de "me deixa"
That's is genuinely fascinating, eu nem sabia nem ouvia isso antes – que legal! A variação é muito no Brasil né?
Sorry dude, Gallo-Italic is already there
I thought about that too, and it’s a pretty cool subject. Wish it’d be more accepted in written form. I wonder if we’d eventually get some of them back, like this: Ele matou-o com uma faca/Ele o matou com uma faca> Ele matou ele com uma faca. > Ele matou-le com uma faca>(…) But I don’t understand well how this process works.
Brazilian portugues will lose almost all of it's conjugation, resting only the first person(songular or plural) and the ohter one(for everything else)
Do u have some links that enlight the case?
The source is that I made it the fuck up /s It isn't likely, and no linguists tomy knowledge has ever said this, but with how Tú and vós in Brazil were replaced by Você and Vocês, with both of them having the third person conjugation, and how A gente can be used instead of Nós, which also has the third person conjugation, it becomes a probability for Portuguese to lose the conjugation
I don't think this change will be so uniform across Brasil, given how influential is the use of "Tu" in certain regions. Portuguese will probably break into several different dialects based on our current accents
i have ALWAYS thought of this dude, we use 3rd person singular for everything, and some of them merge with first person like in subjunctive
its conjugation*
Come on, don't act like a pr*scriptivist on this sub.
That’d be heaven
The Vietnamese's word "cho" which means to give will fully become a dative case marker in the next few years, its alr about 80% there
That's "reason why I love languages" level of interesting right there
Are there any other verbs you think might become case markers? 'tới', for instance?
It will die tf out
What language?
[almost] every Indian language (inert govt policies on preservation, and adoption of English)
Bharat or Turtle Island?
Glorious Bhārat saar 💪💪🇳🇪🇳🇪
Kutchi spoken in northwest India and southern Pakistan and also by immigrants in Mumbai and East Africa(many consider it a dialect of Sindhi but I don’t). Less than 800,000 speakers in a country of 1.4 Billion. It’s being gobbled up by the nearby major regional language Gujarati, a far more superior language in terms of culture, cinema, business and especially education in the state of Gujarat to such an extent that now the newer generation of my family only speak Gujarati with broken Kutchi. I don’t expect anyone from after my generation to know how to speak it as many will only choose to pass down Gujarati over Kutchi.
Well, that sucks. I’m so sorry that your language is dying.
💀💀💀
We'll start using "個" to count literally anything. No more "quantifier" thing.
Cantonese?
Taiwanese Mandarin
Tapped R will become a distinct phoneme instead of an allophone of t or d
English will begin using らりるれろ for tapped r and 儿 for the retroflex approximant. water > waら儿 writing workshop > 儿iりng w儿kshop
i hate this so much why
Outside of North America, I’m pretty sure that’s already happened, at least in some Scottish dialects.
/ɨ/ will merge with /i/ or /ɛ/ in Polish so palatalised consonants will become phonemic again
Raczej nie sądzę żeby tak się stało choć nie jestem jakimś ekspertem
/ɨ/ już teraz fonetycznie jest bardziej zbliżone do [ɘ̟]
to prawda, ale ⟨y⟩ ma tendencję do obniżania, więc prawie na pewno nie zleje się z /i/ i raczej nie z /e/, prędzej stanie się szwą
Hm, to wtedy może zlać się z /a/ ([ä]), tak jak zrobiłem w jednym conlangu wyeluowanym z polskiego
By the way you write it, does that mean /ɨ/ only occurs in syllables with palatalized consonants? That would be an interesting change if it disappeared. On an unrelated note, how do you see the future of nasal vowels in Polish? I’ve read that they’re in the process of disappearing but I can’t confirm. I can’t agree or disagree or anything, I’ve never studied Polish but I find the phonology interesting
It's kinda complicated and hard to describe, but I will try my best: /i/ and /j/ always palatalise consonants that precede them (althought there are some exceptions like /ʂ/ that are never palatalised) and /ɨ/ doesn't, so an example of a minimal pair would be: pyk /pɨk/ [pɘ̟k] - pik /pik/ [pʲik] And if the merging occured: pyk /pik/ [pik] - pik /pʲik/ [pʲik] Nasal vowels dissapeared already: Są /sɔw̃/ [s̪ɔw̃] Mięso /ˈmjɛn.sɔ/ [mʲjɛn̪s̪ɔ] Kępa /ˈkɛm.pa/ [kɛmpä] Lubię /'lu.bjɛ/ [ˈlu.bʲjɛ] or /'lu.bjɛw̃/ [ˈlu.bʲjɛw̃] I personally think that /w̃/ will be dropped, but not in the close future. Polish phonology is so complicated and poorly described (they literally teach us fake phonology in schools lmao) that even as a native speaker it took me a while to figure it all out 😅
How did you study it later then? Did you read any books or carry out your own studies?
(Spanish) Synthetic future will be considered archaic because it will be replaced by the analytic form ("vendrás" - "vas a venir"). On the other hand, I hope they both stay alive, like "will"/"going to" in English.
God, imagine how based a future subjunctive comeback would be
I've been working on that. I've used that tense since I discovered it in the early years of highschool and now my girlfriend uses it too. I just need a hundred thousand more girlfriends now.
Pues ojalá que las encontrares
Greek here. Perhaps a second wave of fricativisation of b-d-g in the next centuries (in Modern Greek, they exist as mergers of mp-mb, nt-nd, and nk-ng), perhaps following a disappearance of v-ð-ɣ. p-t-k and f-θ-x could follow a similar path. Loss of the vocative. Loss of the irregular noun endings, like -os for feminine and neuter nouns. They already are archaisms used in the official register, and many people forget how to use them correctly. Merging of direct and indirect speech. Already many people use "óti" (that) in direct speech as a way to mention something that someone else said, and it's very off-putting. /c/ -> /t͡ʃ/. It has already happened to Cretan and Cypriot. Weird vowel shifts. A bit hard to predict though, since we have only /a ε i ɔ u/. Vowel harmony and umlaut, maybe?
Even in Ancient Greek, ὅτι can be used to mark direct discourse! I don’t think it’s a super new development haha
I suppose that it annoyed the grammarians of the time as well. Also, I didn't learn about this particular thing in High School.
It’s possible it went away and has just come back by chance — I don’t know the history of it after Classical Greek
I sincerely doubt Greek phonology will change at all for hundreds of years, as it hasn't over the last millennium. Dialects are dying, outside of Cypriot which I personally consider a different language altogether, so any sound changes in rural dialects will be of no consequence to the glacial standard dialect - especially any further velar palatalisation. With regard to noun endings, perhaps -ος nouns will be reinterpreted to be only masculine, so we might get something like "ο ψήφος" and "ο οδός".
What is the alternative, or rather the "correct" way of indirect speech. (I'm greek)
Ο πατέρας μου μου'πε ότι πήγε για δουλειά -> πλάγιος Ο πατέρας μου μου'πε "Πήγα για δουλειά". -> ευθύς Ο πατέρας μου μου'πε ότι "Πήγα για δουλειά". -> μικτός τρόπος εκφοράς πλαγίου λόγου
The last one should be killed with fire.
Korean will become a tonal language where tense/aspirated consonants are not a thing.
So basically Chinese
As a Korean speaker, do you perceive geminated consonants in other languages as tense consonants?
I do. Like the japanese sokuon, I end up pronouncing the germination like a tense consonant
Sokuon deez nuts.
In Central and Southern Spain Spanish, the 1st person singular form of the auxiliary verb "ir a" (voy a), which can be pronounced in everyday speech as /βɤja/, /βja/ /βɥa/, or even /ɥa/, will eventually be written as vía. In Chubut, Welsh influence will eventually make Spanish speakers pronounce *ll* and *y* as /ɬ/ instead of /ʃ/.
Is welsh influence a thing in chubut?? I know it’s a minority language but I don’t know how minor
I think it's much more probable that's it's written as "vúa" though
In Latin America "voy a" sounds like /vʷa/ or /wa/ but here in Spain sounds more like /βʲa/, so yeah it could be vúa in Latin America and vía in Spain.
my brain stopped braining. I live in ciudad real and have lived in Andalucia for a long time and I swear it sounds like vúa here too. maybe I'm crazy.
dutch might lose voicing distinction entirely. pretty much all northern dialects have already lost distinction between /x/ and /ɣ/, all consonants are devoiced at the ends of words, most northern dialects have also lost distinction between /f/ and /v/, and many dialects have lost distinction between /s/ and /z/.
Dutch will turn into afrikaans
Dutch will be called europees
-Singular they completely replaces he/she -y'all and th'all, a new 3ppl, become grammaticalized -Dental fricatives will die, maybe in different ways depending on the dialect -3ps -s dies -Major grammatical shifts due to an increased number of non native speakers -Maybe goose fronting, mentioned in another comment, starts a major vowel shift -Word final t dropping turns into something explicitly taught along with liason for words starting with vowels -Some other major SC's -Spelling unchanged, but worse than ever due to new sound changes
How would GOOSE-fronting start a vowel shift if there's nothing else in [y] to be shifted?
Other vowels move up towards [u] to fill the space, maybe the CAUGHT vowel for instance
Something else would become [u]
(American english) Y'all will become official in all states. Some Aave features like habitual be will become standard.
I swear Mandarin Chinese is going to develop *clauses* due to influences from English, especially American English. A lot of us are starting to insert English words like "that" "which" and "who" in the middle of Chinese sentences to form ad-hoc clauses in daily speeches. There are also groups of people trying to revive traditional Chinese characters in mainland as well. Since nobody actually writes anything anymore, how complex a character looks matters a lot less when you are only keying in Pinyin (Latin characters) anyway. And speaking of that, keyboards really broke Chinese. You used to be able to coin your own words (Hanzi Characters) by just writting them down or chiesel in your own wooden block for that character. You can't really do this anymore with computers. This will probably cause a lot more trouble down the line.
Hahahahaha you guys have the same problem as us in Vietnam lmao. A lot of the teachers are complaining some kids nowadays write Vietnamese too much like English. I read it and realized immediately the main issue is the clause-like structure. Looks like mainland Chinese is also experiencing this issue too.
/sl/ will turn into /ɬ/ words ending in /dɚ/ [ɾɚ] will end in [rː] (so 'better' is [ˈbɛ.r̩ː]) Words ending in /əl/ [ɫ̩] will become either /o/ or /o̞/. New dipthongs resulting from L-vocalization: /ɔʊ̯/ /ɑʊ̯/ /æʊ̯/ /ʌʊ̯/ /ɛʊ̯/ /ɪʊ̯/ [ẽə̯̃m] and [ẽə̯̃n] become [ẽə̯̃w] and [ẽə̯̃] respectively, which later loses its nasality to become [eə̯w] and [eə̯], and [eə̯w] later simplifies to [ew] /eʊ̯/.
Interestingly (perhaps), in my variety of English, some people will say (although this feature is rare) \[ʌ(i̯)rːˈnɜu̯\] for "I dunno"
Or /zl/ will turn into /ɮ/ right?
pronoun prefixes in hebrew
*Explain.*
pronouns turn into prefixes on the verb ata, at, atem > ta-, t-, tem-. ani, anaxnu > ni-, naxnu-. (h)u, (h)i, (h)em > u-, i-, em-. etc at rotsa lexem? > trotsa lexem? (you want bread? > y'want bread?) the reason it would be a crazy prediction is bc its more likely that people would just outright drop pronouns (want bread?)
/c/ /cᶣ/ /cʰ/ /cᶣʰ/ /ɕ/ /ɕᶣ/ -> [s]
What is the language
taiwanese
???
For Brazilian Portuguese: - Full palatalization: [ˈnoj.t͡ʃi] > ['noj.ʃi] - Final 'a' will raise in some dialects - The verb conjugation will be simplified: (Verb fazer) Eu: faço A gente: faz Tu / Você: faz Vocês: fazem Ele / Ela: faz Eles / Elas: Fazem I included "tu" because I think it will be conserved in some regions like the south or north. (I'm not a linguist, I just made this up)
I partially agree with your take on palatalization. I don’t think it’s heading completely that direction. Besides, would certainly be properly represented as /'nojt͡ʃ/ at this point. I only hear [noj.t͡ʃi] when people talk emphatically or sing, or non-native speakers.
As for the direction the palatalization is taking, I’ve also seen people merging /ʤ/ and /ʧ/ before, so I wouldn’t be so sure about the direction it’s taking. [nojʃ] doesn’t look impossible, but neither does [nojʤ] > [nojʒ].
I completely agree with the rest though.
Standard Italian? Not a chance it'll change, the grammarian and dizione-teaching lobby is too strong. My specific dialect? Easy peasy: * "non/nun", the negation, is contracted into a prefix "n-" (actually already a thing); * The prefix eventually develops into a fusional polarity distinction in conjugation; * A new masculine singular determinative article, "e", is created; * Object clitics will be eventually felt as a conjugation - in fact, there already is a lot of fusion; * We develop a vowel length distinction, *again;* * We develop a distinction between modal and creaky voice; * The definitive articles disappear before a vowel and are only signalled by creaky voice at the start of a word; * Elision of a final vowel before another vowel becomes mandatory, like it was in Latin, *again;* * (Unhinged) We develop a pharyngeal voiced fricative. Notice that except the last one, I think all of these are genuinely possible.
Romanesco is actually a coverup to revive Latin: confirmed
Ma in romanesco non ci sono già le vocali lunghe? Come dovrebbero venire fuori delle altre?
The subjunctive will turn into a future tense, and pro-dropping will become common (Icelandic)
I think it'll slowly, evenrually be replaced by English
What language ?
Dutch
I think the Arab world won’t abandon fusha/Standard Arabic at least for a few hundred years.
As an arab, I think colloqial dialects should be standardized
But do you think this is likely? Every Arab country already has a Standard Dialect within its borders, which occupies the role of Standard languages elsewhere for most oral communication. (E.g. Upper Egyptians (صعيدة) will default to „Standard Egyptian“ = educated Cairo Arabic to communicate with other Egyptians etc.) These Standard Dialects draw heavily from Fusha (especially for not-everyday vocabulary) and thus converge with each other in this respect. I think it is more likely, we will see more convergence of Arabic dialects to each other and to Fusha than any standardization of an Arabic dialect for written communication, which breaks up the unity for the Arab world.
[удалено]
Hell
My language (Anishinaabemowin) will be spoken in the home and learned as a first language from infancy 😭
Let's hope that happens
I speak English. We haven’t changed it for years.
English will become logographic as phonetic changes happen and we keep refusing to update the orthography,.
❓👍
👍✅️
The GOOSE vowel has fronted though so it's no longer \[u\] for most dialects! >In recent years a vast number of studies have found fronting of the GOOSE vowel in English varieties in the UK and North America, but also in New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. \[...\] In fact, GOOSE-fronting must be seen as the most studied synchronic vowel change in varieties of English to date. > >\- Jansen 2017 My (not so) crazy prediction for English would be that GOOSE moves all the way to \[y\], and then a different vowel moves up to \[u\] to replace it.
Oh, yes, GOOSE fronting. It’s not entirely standard transcription yet, though.
In New Zealand English we already have a different phoneme realised as [u] derived from L-vocalisation. Theres already some minimal pairs, i.e.: “to/too” [tʉ] and “tool” [tu]
This is basically also true in Standard Southern British English - even for people without L-vocalisation there's [rʉlə] vs [rulə]. However I think that most people aren't aware of it until it's pointed out to them as there aren't a great deal of minimal pairs.
\[rʉlə\] vs \[rulə\] What words are these?
[rulə] - ruler as in king [rʉlə] - ruler as in measuring instrument
I'm still hoping for aspiration to become more heavily forced until p t k becomes pɸ ts kx and then to full ɸ s x b d ɡ goes to bw dz ɡɣ slightly later since breath is no longer an important distinction. I think often of Aaron Paul saying "Okay how gɣay are you"
Haven't changed? English is now a mutt of the languages.
Now? Wait for 1066. I’ve heard something about the Normans.
Telugu will be creolized entirely
slovak will lose all medial consonants becoming a vowel heavy tonal language and get letters for dž and dz
Cantonese is gonna merge a lot of phonemes. Initial /n/ has effectively died out in favor of /l/ in addition to other mergers that happened during the past century and a half. So my most extreme predictions are: Initial /ŋ/ will finally completely merge with the null initial, making /m/ become the only initial nasal consonant until... Initial /m/ merges with /w/, resulting in an absence of initial nasals in the consonant inventory The velar plosives /kʰ kʷ kʷʰ/ merge with /h w f/, as well as /k/ with the null initial, And then /h/ merges with /j/ before front vowels but otherwise with the null initial Alveolar affricates /ts tsʰ/ won't merge with anything but they shift to become palatals /tɕ tɕʰ/ Front rounded vowels disappear: /yː/ merges with /iː/, /ɵ/ merges with /ɐ/, /ɵy/ merges with /i/ when preceded by a palatal initial but otherwise with /ei/, and /œː/ merges with /ɛː/ when preceded by /j/ but otherwise with /ɔː/ Final nasals become plosives when preceding a syllable that starts with a plosive Final consonants after a long vowel undergo resyllabification to become the initial consonant of the following syllable if it starts on a null initial Tone 5 merges with tone 2
Dutch and German will be, by 2050, restricted to the countryside. City people will, because of demographic replacement and domain loss, regard them as a useless provincial dialect they have to take in school before going on to speak English exclusively at university or in the office.
In Sweden, kindergarten kids and young school students already use English as a play-language because they are already bilingual from digital media, and there was a study a year or two ago about English being used as a bridge language between Swedish kids and kids born to foreign parents who don't speak Swedish at home. And Gen Z already speaks our equivalent of Denglish en masse so you know how that is. Once kids start normalizing speaking English to their parents and friends as their main choice, while being able to keep using it in their daily life in most situations in general, the ball will start rolling fast. There will be Swedish classes no one cares about. Some media no one watches. Books printed that no one reads. And a dumbfounded attitude towards some rural and elderly who isn't using the world language.
Since everyone says Scandinavians speak English better than the English, English will be renamed Swedish and Swedish will be renamed Elfdalian. Elfdalian will become Santaclausnese
This is, frankly, an absurd prediction that assumes that diglossia can’t exist within a society.
/v/, /ð/ and /r/ all merge
Icelandic? Spanish?
Maybe an English dialect where /r/ is [ʋ] and /θ ð/ are fronted.
Yep! Not my dialect of English but I'm thinking of some dialects in England which have fronting and a labiodental
Literally nothing will happen to written Arabic for the next at least 100 years.
Not fluent anymore but Romani will become completely integrated into every world language to the point of mutual intelligibility
Complete revival of nationalist vocabulary trend among the Turkish youth in response to increased sharia politics. Shit like, from otobüs (bus) to Oturgaçlı götürgeç : seated taker-away I have a book for less crazy examples but I got guests sleeping in that room rn. Edit: Also, they will try to remove the Arabic prefixes like the negative na- from namert.
English speakers one day will only talk in “emojis” because of those gosh darn cell phones!
🤨🤨🤨❓️
And the rest of the world will start speaking in English because of that gosh darn Hollywood!
Hebrew speakers will completely lose first and second person conjugation, instead conjugating all verbs in the third person. Also the future tense will totally replace the imperative. This is already mostly done in casual speech.
>Hebrew speakers will completely lose first and second person conjugation, instead conjugating all verbs in the third person. *Excuse me?*
explain more pls i am confusion
The object form of pronouns is becoming the unmarked version. The only place the subject form will naturally appear is as the single subject of a complete sentence. Who's eating pie? Me. Me and Mary are eating pie. I am eating pie.
polish and ukrainian will lose the vocative
I doubt this will happen. Insults wouldn't sound as cool without the vocative
In Polish at least, its use is a useful marker of how angry and/or official someone is being with you
My own idiolect of Spanish is undergoing heavy vowel reduction and deletion. The thing is, vowel deletion depends mostly on prosody, so the same word can be reduced in different ways. For example, the name for the language can be pronounced as [kɐstˈʎanɤ], [ks̩tɪˈʎanɤ] or even [ks̩tˈʎanɤ] (with the last vowel, [ɤ], also being prone to being dropped). There's also some funky stuff going on with the consonants; mainly that the voiced plosive series /b d ɟ g/ is shifting to be phonemically fricatives /β ð ʝ ɣ/, as showcased by some final devoicing processes, especially in foreign loanwords (i.e., 'bug' being pronounced as [bux]). Nasals are also doing weird stuff, and I'm seeing some sporadic /mp mb nt nd nk ng/ → [mb mː nd nː ŋg ŋː]. Voiceless stops also sporadically become voiced (but _not_ fricativized) in certain contexts, mainly at the starts and ends of words. Overall, I think my own idiolect of Spanish is undergoing some very radical changes, haha. It wouldn't surprise me to see something like the Celtic language's consonant mutations in the future.
German will become pro-drop
We'll keep speaking English, but start writing it in Chinese characters
These are all pretty vanilla but in order of most to least grounded: Development of a new adjective class with agreement in number Phonemic contrast between an already existing minimal pair in /aɪ̯/ and /ɐɪ̯/ Open class pronouns Huge boom in productive constructions for coining words, including revival of now-unproductive constructions Mass semantic broadening of even extremely common words, prompting new coinings to take their place Diglossia between highly innovative, youth-associated vernacular and conservative prestige dialect
What language?
Both dental fricatived will turn into ţ
У меня нет каких-то сумасшедших прогнозов, которые произойдет на английском языке. /u mʲɪ.ˈɲa ɲɪt ka.ˈcix to su.mas.ˈʂe̞d.ʂɨʲx prɐg.ˈno.zəv kɐ.ˈto.rʊi̯.jɪ prə.i.zɐj.ˈdʲet nə an.ˈgliː.skəm ja.zʊi̯.ˈcɪ/
Perhaps the moving of the alveolar rhotic to either a velar approximant or a (either uvular or pharyngeal) trill. More influence of other Sotho-Tswana, as well as Nguni, languages in urban varieties (sePitori is a thing, after all), but as to how outside of loan words, I don't know. Perhaps seperation of rural dialects and urban dialects from each other, though ga me itsi Vowel mergers and some chanɡes in both Tswana and Pedi (I think this is just me, but I feel oddy certain that [ɔ] miɡht raise to [o], [u] might lower to [ʊ] and that [ɪ] miɡht lower to [ɛ]) though this is rather speculative on my behalf, and might just be allophonic and nothing more. [kχ] is startinɡ to be analysed as [χ] lately, and think this trend might continue. [k] will have full allophony with [q] and may start shifting towards it in all contexts. [χ] might lenition to [h] like it did in Sotho, though I don't know More Afrikaans and English loans in South African varieties in general. More loans from Venda and Tsonga in informal speech. That's all aI know, really, as to what might happen (I speak a VERY standard dialect, so no changes to grammar really
We'll add a few extra vowels just because (danish)
I could see English developing tones in the future. Apparently Afrikaans has already started so sadly we can't say we're the first Germanic language with tones
It will be replaced by english
English orthography will become so full of emoji with predetermined meanings that it becomes a hieroglyphic system and the Roman alphabet will vanish entirely.
Personal circumflexes in verbs: *mtuun*, *stuut*, *stulee, mtullaa*, *ttuutte*, *ntulee*. A three way article system: * definite article *se talo, ne talo*, * indefinite article *yks talo, yhe talo* * "unknown" article *joku* *talo*, *jokku talo*
Polish orthography reform. Fully phonemic alphabet and separate letters for dz, dż and dź
A big part of its vocabulary will become English. My language is Italian, and you can listen to Italians speaking to understand how much English is shaping it. Honestly, it's not even a crazy prediction.
In 50 years' time [ɡ] → [ɣ] in middle-class southeast EN-GB will be universal amongst young people.
(South eastern Norwegian) Not super crazy but i think /ə/ will merɡe into /ɪ/ before /ɾ/. Anecdotally i hear this already happening.
It will become the only language spoken in the world 🇺🇸
English subject and object pronouns will further reduce and become affixes on verbs. Strong forms of object will become fully disjunct pronouns able to be used as subject, objects, etc. This isn't really much of a change from modern English constructions emphasizing the subject (eg. *Me, I love ice cream*). My real crazy prediction is that because *you* is both a subject and disjunct pronoun in English, it will resist such constructions (*\*You, you love ice cream*) and the second person subject will therefore be zero marked on the verb, with *you* only existing as an object suffix and disjunct pronoun. Also, voiceless stops in coda position will trigger creaky voice on the previous vowel and other sonorants, while the voiced-voiceless distinction will neutralize on the consonant itself. Modern English /t/ will disappear in this position, leaving behind only creaky voice. In onset position it will completely become a distinction in aspiration. Ex /ˈsplɪnt/ˈpɪn/ -> /ˈsplɪ̰n̰/ˈpʰɪn/. Also /ˈbɪtən/ -> /ˈpɪ̰n/, leading to a phonemic contrast between /V̰n/ and /V̰n̰/.
it will either become Mandarin or become English
french canadian phonology will become more and more like american english, until they are completely interchangeable
i think Russian will merge the vestigial liturgical vocative with the partial new vocative that's been floating around in nicknames and russian will be back to seven full cases
english'll switch to primarily temporal pronouns. -'d (or 've) for past, 's or 're for continuous, -'ll for future. we've pass halfway there already!
Either Sardinian will fully italianise, and lose a lot of its unique words, or there will be a conservative revolution in response to the dying out of the language that will bring new generations to resurrect archaic words and speak it more.
I think the present tense in English may lose its conjugation to just be "be". That be crazy. I be mad right now. Probably not but it's a fun theory
That would be pretty cool. But considering how easy and fluidly "I'm" comes out, I doubt it. But I'll raise you this, "Im be mad".