SEVERAL weeks ago, Johnson discussed his debate with Nicholas Ostler about the lingua franca of the future. Johnson thinks that English has a very long run ahead of it. Mr Ostler sees English’s time as coming to an end, to be replaced by machine-translation tools that will remove the need for people to learn to speak, read and write a lingua franca. But we agreed that whatever the long run might look like, the next few decades are set. No language has anything like a chance of displacing English.
Interestingly, about two-thirds of English-speakers are not first-language speakers of English. To put it another way: English no longer belongs to England, to superpower America, or even to the English-speaking countries generally. Rather, English is the world’s language. What happens to a language when it becomes everybody’s? Shaped by the mouths of billions of non-native speakers, what will the English of the future look like?
A look into the past can give us an idea. English is of course not the first language learned by lots of non-natives. When languages spread, they also change. And it turns out, they do so in specific directions.
For example, a 2010 study by Gary Lupyan and Rick Dale found that bigger languages are simpler. In more precise terms, languages with many speakers and many neighbours have simpler systems of inflectional morphology, the grammatical prefixes and suffixes (and sometimes “infixes”) that make languages like Latin, Russian and Ancient Greek hard for the foreign learner. Contrary to educated people’s stereotypes, the tiny languages spoken by “stone-age” or isolated tribes tend to be the world’s most complicated, while big ones are less so, by this metric.
What Messrs Lupyan and Dale found through a statistical look at thousands of languages, John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, found in a detailed study of just five. In his 2007 book “Language Interrupted”, he asked why certain big, prestigious languages seem systematically simpler than their ancestors and cousins. English is simpler than German (and Old English); modern Persian is a breeze next to Old Persian and modern Pushtu; modern spoken Arabic dialects have lost much of the grammatical curlicues of classical Arabic; modern Mandarin is simpler than other modern Chinese languages; and Malay is simpler than related Austronesian languages. Mr McWhorter’s conclusion, in simple terms, is that when lots of adults learn a foreign language imperfectly, they do without unnecessary and tricky bits of grammar. (Most languages have enough built-in redundancy for grammars to be more complicated than they have to be.) Modern Mandarin is a perfect example of a language almost completely devoid of inflectional morphology, all those prefixes and suffixes. All languages have their complexities, but Mr McWhorter believes that Mandarin, English, Persian, Malay and Arabic dialects are all clearly simpler than they used to be.
What, then, can we predict English will lose if the process goes on? An easy choice seems to be “whom”. English was once heavily inflected; all nouns carried a suffix showing whether they were subjects, direct objects, indirect objects or played some other role in a sentence. Today, only the pronouns are inflected. And while any competent speaker can use I, me, my and mine correctly, even the most fluent can find whom (the object form ofwho) slippery. So whom might disappear completely, or perhaps only survive as a stylistic option in formal writing.
Another gilded-lily complication of English that foreign learners struggle with is the tense-aspect system, including three present-tense forms, I live, I am living and I do live, plus compound forms like I will have been living. These are tricky for speakers who don’t have them in their native languages. While these different tenses and aspects focus on different things, the differences are often not crucial. In the very long run, as English is spoken by more people who have learned it as a foreigner, some simplification of this system would not be surprising.
What about pronunciation and dialect? Predictions that English would become a single undifferentiated mass in the age of mass communication have been shown wrong. Indeed, scholars see new dialects developing. William Labov, an American linguist, has identified a new “Northern Cities Shift” in the vowel system. And linguists see British dialects moving and changing, but not disappearing, as we reported here. Perhaps more relevantly, there are already recognisable accents, vocabulary and, to some extent, grammatical differences in dialects spoken in non-English-native territories like India and Singapore. New dialects will appear wherever English makes greater inroads into daily life—say perhaps Scandinavia, where children are learning English at younger and younger ages.
Or take Brussels, one place where a big non-native-speaker population uses English every day. For example, European Union bureaucrats are likely to use the English “control” to mean “monitor” or “verify”, because contrôler and kontrollieren have this meaning in French and German. (Other examples are assist for “attend” and actual for “current”.) The EU’s Court of Auditors has developed a style guide to correct the many EU-isms that have developed out of interference from other European languages. It’s an engaging read that correctly calls these “misused” English words. But if in 50 or 100 years’ time a large population is still fluently and easily using “control” for “monitor” and being perfectly understood, we will have to accept that this is a new dialect of English, not a misuse.
As English grammar gets simpler, and foreigners get to vote their funny practices into the language of Shakespeare, there will always be those who consider this decline, or adulteration. (Fears of decline have been with us for centuries already, after all.) But the declinists can take heart, on two counts. One is that languages don’t really decline. We speak worn-down, clapped-out Anglo-Saxon, but modern English is plenty expressive, because we need it to be. And the second comfort is that this is the price of success: English may simplify because it is spreading. But it is spreading because it is expressive and useful. Most of the world’s languages would love to have the problems that English has.
