The Future of Languages
i
am a linguist no that doesn’t mean that
i speak 84 languages fluently
or that i’m the most boring person in
the world for liking this subject
i make it my job to look at all the
little details
components flaws and irregularities of
language that aren’t appreciated enough
now to some of you that’ll still seem
like a pretty dull topic
what’s the point of it you might ask
well i believe that there’s a hidden
beauty to this field and if you look
hard enough and in all the right places
then it’ll start to reveal its amazing
self
bit by bit you see i’m not only a
linguist
but a conlanger as well
now most of you here probably won’t know
what that is
put simply con hanging is the
application of linguistics
used in simulating the construction and
development of natural languages the way
i like to put it
linguistic fortune telling one of the
defining parts of conlanging
is taking a pre-existing language and
building on it
putting your own spin on it speeding up
the processes of change in a language
from a few hundred years
to a few days essentially you’re mapping
out the potential future of a language
with a bit brainpower so what’s the
point of doing this
well conlanging is an incredibly
powerful tool
it can make us look at language in a way
that we’ve never done before
it can give us glimpses into what the
future holds for language
pretty exciting right so the only
problem is
how do we go about doing this simple
when i can’t lang i see three main parts
to all this the first of which
is phonology this part
is all about the phonemes the sounds in
a language
and we’ll also touch on orthography the
letters in a language so
basically the first part of linguistic
fortune telling is all about
pronunciation and spelling now i’ve
heard a lot of people say that
in order to see the future we must first
look at the past
so to see this all in action we’re
taking a trip back in time
about 5000 years or so
this is proto-indo-european
or p-i-e the reconstructed ancestor of
pretty much
all of europe’s languages including
english
in my opinion proto-indo-european is the
best example of seeing the mechanics of
how
language changes over time
take these words in p.i.e for example
podes and merter respectively meaning
feet and mother imagine calling your
mother mer
every time you eat her i’m hungry
i’m tired i mean you can argue that
we’re lucky to have had these changes
happen
these words they’re quite a bit more
complicated than we used to
you’ve got guttural sounds intonation
and vowel length
all influencing the meaning of the word
now take a look at the sound changes for
each individual word
at first it looks like a bunch of random
shifts but take a closer look
and you’ll be able to identify two main
trends here
the tendency to simplify and the
tendency to shift to more sonorous
sounds
the change from up to the small shifts
and vowel sounds
and the loss of tone lengths and throat
rating consonants are all examples of
this
so by looking at our linguistic ancestor
and analyzing one aspect of it
we found it to draw two conclusions that
we can use to make predictions when
conlanging
and we can put that in practice now
let’s say
that for sound changes to happen the
human race will need to be subjected to
a situation like our current one for
quite a while
i’m exaggerating a bit here but let’s
say that masks are
enough of a nuisance to significantly
affect our speech
people can’t hear each other well
because of these masks
so naturally we’re inclined to make our
speech louder
and instead of shouting all the time we
changed the pronunciation of words
instead so
from feet we could slowly edge towards
words
and sounds that are more sonorous fat
than fat and then we get to fats
and voila we’ve just conlanged we’ve
made logical linguistic predictions
based on things we’ve seen happen to
language before
the second part we can analyze is
colloquialism
this looks at the impact of culture on
language
and vice versa so here we’re looking at
things like idioms metaphors and all
that nitty-gritty cultural stuff
the reference i’m starting out with here
is a bit more distant than p-i-e
i’m taking the example of klingon yep
that brilliant brilliantly raspy
language from star trek spoken by aliens
with prosthetic foreheads
one of the things i love about klingon
is their word for hello
the thing is they don’t have one
the only thing close to greeting is what
do you want and that’s it
if my pop culture knowledge serves me
well then the klingons are a race of
cold-hearted space warriors
and this little feature of their
language is supposed to reflect that
instantly we see just how much the fine
details of a language can tell us about
its speakers
it’s a fine example of culture impacting
a spoken tongue
of course we have examples of things
like this closer to home
take the example of the phrase steal
someone’s thunder
an idiom with a rather amusing origin
now again we’re going back in time this
time to the 1700s
now imagine this scene john dennis
a dramatist of the time has just come up
with an
idea for a thunder machine to use
anonymous plays
the machine was brilliant the play
less so but he soon found his machine
used in a performance of macbeth and
soon everybody heard about how
his thunder had been stolen
that phrase was used so much it was such
a big
point of interest that eventually it
found its way into everyday speech
culture had again woven its way into our
language
so we now know that for culture to have
a considerable impact on language
there has to be events big enough to
interest the speakers as a whole
our current situation seems to check
that box right so let’s see
how do these circumstances manifest
themselves
in the form of language well
one of the biggest points of interest
right now is making sure everything is
hygienic
are you clean are you sanitized you have
a cough
already we’ve seen a change happen and
if this goes on for long enough then
those phrases start to move
up in our priority and like the klingons
and their absence of hello
we could be greeting people with
cleanest of blessings upon you
again this con language mindset lets us
see the linguistic future one which
instantly reflects a cool part of
today’s society
now we come to the third and final part
of linguistic fortune telling
manner of communication this
is an umbrella term for a rather broad
part here we’re looking at shifts in
grammar
word meaning as well as methods through
which we communicate
now imagine this sometime in the future
we get a huge and i mean huge
influx of people from
non-english-speaking countries
moving to england they don’t speak
english well
we don’t speak their language well so
we have to compensate by communicating
in a way that benefits everybody
the solution well there’s more than one
the first is a trend which we’ve talked
about before
simplification although we as native
speakers don’t realize it
english isn’t an incredibly difficult
language
you teach today but you taught yesterday
yet for some reason you didn’t pro if
you preach in the past
no mispronounced gnome not gonomi
and rism has absolutely no vowels in it
yet we pronounce it like it does
maddening for all those people moving to
england this will be too much of a
hassle for them so
naturally they cut corners they make
things easier more logical even
because of the inconveniences to put it
mildly that
english poses to foreigners that need to
learn it now
a little linguistic revolution happens
now that is what you do if you teach in
the past
that is how we’ll be spelling gnome
instead
and that is what we’re actually
pronouncing rhythm like
another phenomenon we could see happen
is a semantic shift
a shift in the meaning of a word now
i’ve seen this happen myself at home my
parents are from malaysia
and there are a few words that
malaysians have
adopted from the english language but
have changed the meaning of slightly
one of these words is happening
native english speakers will know that
this is the present participle of the
verb to happen
when we use it at home though it’s an
adjective we used to describe
fun hip sing situations and whatnot
you could argue that this is a lot like
slang we take pre-existing words
change the meaning of them then use them
in casual situations
could this happen in the future of
course
again let’s get back into our contacts
mindset and randomly pick a word that
we’ve heard quite a lot recently
maybe lockdown right now it means a
state of isolation for
safety or security as time goes on we’ll
start to use that word more and more
often and
with that increase in use comes a
widening of its meaning
so maybe in the course of a few years
we’ll find that lockdown is not just a
state of isolation
but a boring event that drains happiness
seems pretty accurate right there’s one
more shift
that we haven’t encountered for spoken
language
to sign language
now it’s time for a little bit more
exaggeration again i’m taking the
example of thick masks
apart from speech hand gestures are a
crucial part of human communication
with harder to hear speech naturally our
gestures could become more pronounced
more noticeable we could start to
associate specific gestures with
specific words
then our range of gestures could grow we
could put them in certain orders we
build more and more sentences and soon
we might have no need whatsoever for
spoken language
this is exactly how natural sign
language develops
if we’re exposed to the right conditions
so to speak
we could very well follow in the
footsteps of signers
so three parts
three ways in which we could approach
conlanging our little linguistic fortune
telling
phonology colloquialism and manner of
communication
this isn’t just the result of some 14
year old boy rambling on about some
niche topic
this is proof of just how fascinating it
can be to peer into the future of
language
it’s proof of just how much language can
say about us
it’s proof of just how much power we
have over the way we speak
and it’s proof of just how rapidly
language is developing
sure you could argue that conlanging is
just
a daydream of what could be but how
could you deny the tantalizing glimpses
of the linguistic possibilities that it
offers
tell me can you imagine calling these
your farts
greasing your friends by wishing them a
clean sanitized day
writing english in a heavily simplified
way like this
or even signing to your friends that
language has the potential to change
every single time someone opens their
mouth
it’s up to us as speakers to drive that
potential forward
with the help of that little tool called
conlanging you’ve all seen the future in
the past 10 or so minutes
now it’s time to speak it thank you for
[Applause]
listening