Will today's big languages still be commonly understood in 1,000 years?

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SpanishInput
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Will today's big languages still be commonly understood in 1,000 years?

Postby SpanishInput » Sat Dec 25, 2021 6:46 pm

This is something I've been pondering recently.

On the one hand, if the past 1,000 years are any indication, the answer would be no. The TV we watch today and the novels we read today will not be understood by common people in 1,000 years, just like we today can't understand Beowulf or the Glosas Emilianenses without some previous learning. Also, the internet is causing new language trends and memes to quickly reach every corner of the world, thus (seemingly) accelerating change.

On the other hand, 300 years ago the Real Academia Española was born with the mission to "fixate" the Spanish language, and similar standarization efforts have taken place with other languages. IMHO, the RAE has been successful. We can still easily read texts from 400 years ago, and when YouTube demolished the barriers to broadcast video content to the entire world and we were suddenly able to watch people from all over the Hispanidad upload their homemade videos, we had no big problems understanding each other. I guess we also have to thanks Hollywood and Disney, which pretty much invented "neutral Spanish" for movie dubs. I've even seen children imitate the way of speaking of neutral movie dubs. In the Spanish speaking world, both the RAE and its dictionaries are seen as authorities, and the fact that many influencers want to reach a global audience makes them "neutralize" the way they speak. We now also have autocorrection everywhere, so if you want to write something the "wrong" way you actually have to try (unless you use a similar sounding word).

So, there are both forces that promote fast change, particularly in changing word usage and in the adoption of foreign words. But there are also forces that try to fixate the current spelling standards with minimal change, and, in the case of influencers (which seemingly everybody and their cat wants to be now), it's in their best interest to "neutralize" their speech.

So, given these opposing forces, what do you think? Will today's videos, movies and books still be understood in 1,000 years? At least those in the big (UN, FIGS, CJK) languages?
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Re: Will today's big languages still be commonly understood in 1,000 years?

Postby zgriptsuroica » Sun Dec 26, 2021 3:59 am

SpanishInput wrote:In the Spanish speaking world, both the RAE and its dictionaries are seen as authorities,


Eh, to an extent, depending quite heavily on who you ask. Though they've made strides in this area recently, they are still a fantastically conservative, prescriptivist organization. As such, it's not uncommon in the Americas to find people of the opinion that the RAE are a bunch of snobby know it alls engaging in linguistic colonialism by privileging and attempt to impose peninsular standards upon the rest of the world. For all the content creators who try to conform to a more neutral standard, you have plenty who play up their regional speech. Just within the world of podcasts, look at shows like Leyendas Legendarias, No Me Hagas Caso or es un crimen, which lean into Mexican, Puerto Rican and Porteño regionality pretty hard. In some areas, the RAE has been fairly successful, in others not so much. From this side of the Atlantic, they seem to be losing ground on things like title case, for example, with more and more people following English/German norms than those typical of Spanish and other Romance languages. The RAE has succeeded more in policing the literary variant of Spanish, and by extension the Spanish used in media intended for an international audience, but I would say it largely ignores the language as it's actually spoken and treats less prestigious varieties as defective.

I doubt that people will lose the ability to comprehend languages spoken today entirely, but I also imagine it will be increasingly uncommon and those who do will likely only really understand the most formal registers with few exceptions. In only 631 years, English has changed substantially enough from its Middle English forms that I imagine most individuals without prior training or broad knowledge of related languages wouldn't understand it very well:

John Gower wrote:
Of hem that written ous tofore
The bokes duelle, and we therfore
Ben tawht of that was write tho:
Forthi good is that we also
In oure tyme among ous hiere
Do wryte of newe som matiere,
Essampled of these olde wyse
So that it myhte in such a wyse,
Whan we ben dede and elleswhere,
Beleve to the worldes eere
In tyme comende after this.
Bot for men sein, and soth it is,
That who that al of wisdom writ
It dulleth ofte a mannes wit
To him that schal it aldai rede,
For thilke cause, if that ye rede,
I wolde go the middel weie
And wryte a bok betwen the tweie,
Somwhat of lust, somewhat of lore,
That of the lasse or of the more
Som man mai lyke of that I wryte:


Some of this is easy enough to work out if you squint at it a bit, other words like "tho," which seems related to Icelandic þó, are going to be less apparent to the modern reader who might assume that it were a shortening of though.

I would imagine that books and broadcast media will still remain intelligible to those with the time to study them, but much material will be lost to all but the most driven of specialists. This will only be aggravated if languages like Spanish tend more towards a diglossic situation, at least for its less educated speakers, as the literary/formal standard becomes increasingly divorced from the way people actually talk. Obviously those with higher levels of education will retain the ability to switch registers effectively, but it would be disingenuous to pretend that the education systems of Latin America don't leave much to be desired in their outcomes. The same could be said of many other dominant languages of our time, which all have variants of varying intelligibility for those familiar with the prestige standard.

I have a feeling stuff like this will be lost to time, though:

Admittedly, this guy is drunk, but I've known several people who talk eating half their words like this sober.


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Re: Will today's big languages still be commonly understood in 1,000 years?

Postby s_allard » Sun Dec 26, 2021 12:35 pm

1000 years on? What about 500 years ? Or even 150 ? We can all observe that the vocabulary of our modern languages is changing to reflect the changes in the world around us. Grammar changes at a slower pace and for different reasons but it does evolve.

Right now I’m reading the short stories of the famous French writer Guy de Maupassant. Most were published in the 1880’s. They are still quite readable today but you the reader do have to put yourself in the context of late 19th century upper-class France. Even the grammar, particularly the use of the subjunctive, has changed and poses some difficulties for the modern reader. Appreciating this kind of literature today requires a pretty high standard of education and access to a good dictionary.

And since there’s been a lot of talk here about Spanish, I would like to ask how many native Spanish-speakers have read Don Quixote in the original 1605 Spanish of Miguel de Cevantes ? It is the most famous work of Spanish literature but I have yet to meet a native speaker of Spanish who has read the original work. For what my opinion is worth, I read about one page and decided that this was going to be tough going and that my time could be better spent watching Youtube videos on COVID-19 in Spanish.
Last edited by s_allard on Sun Dec 26, 2021 7:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Will today's big languages still be commonly understood in 1,000 years?

Postby Lemus » Sun Dec 26, 2021 3:41 pm

This is a little longer time scale than what you are thinking of but there is a fascinating discussion ongoing as to how to best design nuclear waste sites in order to ensure that future humans will not approach them no matter what course the human race takes.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2020 ... years-time

You'll notice if you dig into this topic a little more that none of the designers spend much time on languages on the assumption that they will become unreadable by future generations at some point. It does seem unlikely that humanity will ever entirely lose the ability to understand English, even if it just becomes the preserve of scholars (and future eccentric language hobbyists!) but I suppose they are just trying to be prepared for anything.

Many of the proposed solutions are a bit beyond the scope of this discussion but the point I want to make is just that the assumption is being made that languages will shift given a long enough time scale, which I think is the safe assumption to make.
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Re: Will today's big languages still be commonly understood in 1,000 years?

Postby Le Baron » Sun Dec 26, 2021 4:30 pm

The biggest change is obviously mass media and global interaction (and to a lesser extent scholarship around language research) which enables us to easily maintain 'standards' without major pockets of change and drift. And yet even a huge language like English has 'drift' in it's international varieties and pidgins and whatnot. How much languages can maintained also depends upon political power. Corsican, for example, didn't just start to spontaneously 'die out' it was under direct assault from French power.

Whereas in the past older varieties of the now 'big' languages had gaps that have had to be reconstructed by scholarship - because no-one in the past was obsessively studying and documenting change - today everything is minutely looked at and catalogued and recorded and filmed. I'm sure change and development will still occur, and in fact it is before our eyes, but that we will have a record of it we can consult.

Barring any giant social catastrophe of course.
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Re: Will today's big languages still be commonly understood in 1,000 years?

Postby Eireannach » Mon Jan 24, 2022 9:11 am

The other people here have made some great points about this already... globalism and modern technology would be quite large factors in preserving big languages as groups would find it incredibly hard to isolate well enough to change their version of the language.

A big factor I believe that would also lead to languages being commonly understood in 1000 years is the standardisation of the languages. As languages, as we know them today have been standardised through the printing press for example... as English was a spelling mess (It still is a spelling mess haha) before William Caxton brought the printing press to England and the work of scholars in the centuries after gave us the spellings that I am currently using for example.

There will be some definite changes over a millennium, particularly in slang and some words only being used by some speakers in various countries but I believe it would mostly remain the same, thanks to technology and globalism.
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Re: Will today's big languages still be commonly understood in 1,000 years?

Postby Iversen » Mon Jan 24, 2022 10:07 am

During the coming 1000 years it's likely that there will be at least one nuclear war and/or a major solar mass ejections like the one in 1859 or worse, and both things will cause so much chaos that our languages will change drastically - and our digital records will be gone, and actually we couldn't have accessed them because our computer chip factories will also have been destroyed. And the lithium deposits will have been depleted so that the few club-wielding survivors couldn't even light up the cell phones they might find in our rubbish dumps (plastic does survive!)

So no, today's big languages will not be commonly understood in 1,000 years - not even Chinese...
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Re: Will today's big languages still be commonly understood in 1,000 years?

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Jan 24, 2022 3:11 pm

"Commonly"? Probably not. Easily? Yes.

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