Hey everyone,

One of the ideas that most strikes me about the future is that it appears that the emergence of a new language will be impossible, or extremely unlikely at least.

• There are far too many people on the world.
• A very large amount of these people (in particular, the ones that live in a developed society) know and use the languages of the most developed nations (i.e. English is extremely well known, so is the Mandarin, etc.)
• Incredible amounts of information are stored in writing and audio files.

The three propositions above, when taken together, seem to imply to me that, if society will keep flourishing, then one language will be the norm in the limit, and in the closer future (say, within the next 1000 years), a small set of languages that we use today will be of common us.

So my main claim here is that it will be impossible (or extremely unlikely) for a new language to develop. Do you guys think the same? If you do, how do you feel about that? If you don't, what do you think will happen?

I guess the reason this concerns me is that, if we will live for tens of thousands (or even more) of years as advanced societies, does this mean that one of the main characteristics of the civilization that would exist in the future has already been set? (Namely, the language)

Language its something like use, it evole and transform, the english or french spoke 500 years ago was different.

it could easily be a mixte between English and madarin. Like Cajun was the union of french an english.

I know that's how it used to be in the past, but consider again statements 2 and 3 in my OP. It seems very doubtful, at best, to suppose that this is how things will remain.

In particular, 3 is the biggest point here. Maybe it is the case that once a society is able to maintain huge amounts of information, then the encryption method used to encrypt the information will be harder to change, since deviations at any present time will be corrected swiftly by much larger new media entering the set of information in the set encryption code.

So in simpler terms, say that somewhere, people started to speak and write english ever so slightly differently (this doesn't count slang, by the way). Let's call their language EnglishX. Suppose that during a time interval T, N packets of information are created in language EnglishX, and M packets of information are created in plain English. However, statement 1 and 2 from my OP show that N is extremely small compared to M obviously. Hence, during this time interval T, the information in EnglishX is "drowned" by the information in English, and it will be as if it didn't create any new influence.

It can easily be reasoned that over time, the people of language EnglishX will die out compared to the ever-growing speakers of English (or of any other already-existing language, like say Mandarin).

I think a 'basic' language will eventually be used around the globe(either by choice or a slow merging of languages). Unlees someone comes up with a universal translator.

Assuming that the trend of the world becoming more interconnected continues I can see the dominant languages picking up words from each other. However I don't think they would ever merge.

It would be cool though if we could come up with one standard Earth language. We could call it Terran or something similar.

I imagine as the world gets smaller and even more communicative, one day a global (interplanetary?) language will emerge, probably whatever English is like a hundred years from now. It's already very prevalent, but it'll be totally dominant and an official language in every country.

Mandarin will never replace English. China may one day become an economic superpower, but never the cultural behemouth USA was and is. English is also easier and already has a massive head-start.

Society which is by default quite lazy and/or greedy,  would see it as to bothersome to change the language. (companies and the countries would also have to invest a ton of money in changing documents and street signs and whatnot)

I mean lets say you mix up the germanic parts of english with french to create a new language frenglish. (it will still be quite like english since you replaced stuff like language with langue or change with change etc... while you kept stuff like house, finger, shirt etc..)

But the difference would be huge enough to bother most people. I mean Shakespeare english is like another language to alot of people and thats basically english lol.

So you either have to translate everything that is out there so new generations have use for it or you will be forced to be bilingual for a long time or you wait for the "language merge" until google translate is perfected and the process of translation will be automated.

What will likely happen is that countries with similar dialects or "languages" like dutch and german and spanish and portoguese or polish and czech will merge their languages. In this case it will not be too hard to understand the "ancient" books and files etc. our ancestors left for us.

P.s anything would have been so easy by now if germany had won WW2 xD at least in europe