Since linguistics is a science, can it make predictions about how languages will be in the next decades or even centuries? We know a lot of things about the evolution of IE languages since Proto-IE appeared somewhere in Eastern Europe, so I wonder if we can extrapolate these changes and create computer aided models that enable us to construct living languages in their future shape. What do you think? What are the trends of English and other major languages that one can already detect? For example, in Spanish there exists a simplification patter: verbal conjugations are dissapearing and periphrastic constructions are preferred instead. For instance "voy a jugar" instead of "jugaré". Noun-adjective agreement is weakening: some colors like verde, amarillo, and numerals don't agree in gender, so one can predict that maybe grammatical agreement between adjective and noun will be lost in the following centuries. Even in some Spanish dialects one can hear "tres mujer" instead of "tres mujeres", hence singular/plural will be simply expressed by numerals, like in Chinese: dos hombre, un perro,tres manzana, ...
Can linguistics predict how languages will evolve?
The Northern cities vowel shift will increase. So will the Canadian and California vowel shift. After a while, I would imagine that the accent in those regions will become as strong as the Southern shift is now.