Future of the English Language

I've been Thinking about this for a while and it seems to me that in the future there will develop an increasing disparity between "standard" English and the colloquial English. Of course there was always a disparity between standard and colloquial English, but the spread of English to all parts of the globe will lead, IMO, for a distinction to develop between a "classical" English spoken in formal settings and used in formal writing and an English "Koine" used in conversation. "Classical" English will evolve into a lingua franca that most people will be fluent in in addition to the language or dialect of English "Koine" they speak, like how Classical Arabic is used, IIRC, by speakers of different modern Arabic dialects.


Here are some trends I see in the future of English in the US:


Spread of the use of "y'all" as a 2nd person plural pronoun.

Spread of the pin-pen vowel merger ( high e and low e before n).

Spread of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.

Spread of the cot-caught (ah-aw) merger

Use of "more X" and "most X" will continue to replace -er and -est endings.

"They" will become used more and more regularly as a personal-neuter singular pronoun ("it" is "impersonal" and thus considered inappropriate to be used for people).

A slow breakdown in the I/me (subjective vs. objective 1st person singular pronoun) distinction. This is already happening with people saying "Me and John are going..." instead of "John and I are going...".

Scottish dialects are a lot different from Queen's English as well. We have pretty much no long vowel sounds here any more: 'cooks' and 'spooks' have exactly the same sound in Scottish acccent.

Where I grew up in the New Jersey some of these shifts have already occurred. The you plural form is yous often coupled with guys as in the sentence: "where are yous guys going?" Another shift that has taken place in my neck of the woods can be seen in the words dog and chocolate. In these words the "o" sound has morphed into an "aw" sound. Dog becomes dawg and chocolate becomes chawcolate. This shift is also present in word with "alk" like chalk, walk, talk; all these words have morphed into awk. Walk becomes wawk, talk becomes tawk, etc.

You also left out the distinction between who and whom.

Originally posted by King John Where I grew up in the New Jersey some of these shifts have already occurred. The you plural form is yous often coupled with guys as in the sentence: "where are yous guys going?" Another shift that has taken place in my neck of the woods can be seen in the words dog and chocolate. In these words the "o" sound has morphed into an "aw" sound. Dog becomes dawg and chocolate becomes chawcolate. This shift is also present in word with "alk" like chalk, walk, talk; all these words have morphed into awk. Walk becomes wawk, talk becomes tawk, etc. You also left out the distinction between who and whom.

Ack!!! The "Joisey" accent!!!

My accent is the stereotypical "Minnesotan" accent of the Upper Midwest.

I turn the diphthongs /ei/ (Long "A," "aye" as in "day") and /ou/ (Long "O," "oh-oo" as in "moan") into /e/ and /o/, the latter being the well known "Minnesotan long O" as in Minnes-ohhh-ta and the former making "day" sound like "dehhh"

In words in which /a/ comes before /g/, as in bag, flag, and agriculture it turns into /ei/, so "b-ah-g" becomes "b-aye-g

Mary, marry, and merry sound the same.

Cot and caught sound the same. Don and Dawn sound the same. "augh" and "aw" is always a plain "ah," never a rounded "aw" as in NYC or New Jersey.


My speech is also affected somewhat by the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_cities_vowel_shift, so my "ah" is different from your "ah" and probably sounds more like your "a" and so on. 

While the above posts are quite old, I could not resist making this obversation. I would have mentioned the accent found in and around the Boston area, as being somewhat unusual. Therefore, they will pronounce "park" as "pauk", "walk" as "Wauk", "not" as "naught", "what" as "waut", etc. I am sure there are many more.

PS, and of course the "er" sound is sometimes added to words.

Edited by opuslola - 12-Nov-2009 at 16:27

As a side note, the FBI keeps recorded samples of all magor regional accents and local variants (south Lousiana is very different from neighboring southeren states and so are Appalacian accents).  The samples are sometimes used to analyze phone threats etc.

Edited by Cryptic - 28-Oct-2010 at 16:23