Will English die out?

>> It is almost certain that in the long run North American English and Englsh English will develop into separate, as in noncrossintelligible, languages <<

The only evidence you have given to support this is some dialect variation and vowel shifting. How does that make a langauge unintelligible? If everyone knows how to understand all the dialects, everyone can still communicate. It is still quite possible for someone speaking AAVE and someone speaking Australian English to communicate even if neither can speak the other dialect.

A second point: As far as I can tell, standard written English can be read by any educated English speaker, no matter the dialect. On the day that I have to translate a paper into British English, I will see some more weight in your argument.

Take the word chips that means tow different things ,one thing in British English, and an other thing in American.

D, did I say that the two would become noncrossintelligible in the near future? That'd be a no. I'm speaking of over a span of time likely measured in hundreds of years, not anytime close to the immediate present. As for "the only evidence [I] have given to support this is some dialect variation and vowel shifting", that was specifically in response to the assertion that the media and telecommunication would prevent such, and thus was not in itself meant to provide evidence for large-scale "speciation", to take a term for biology.

As for your second point, even when there is definite speciation language-wise at the spoken language level, as I said earlier, if you had neglected to read such, the written language would almost certainly remain a coherent whole long after there is no longer a single unitary spoken language at all. Do not confuse written language with spoken language, D, and do not assume that lack of crossintelligibility in speech translates to lack of crossintelligibility in writing, or that crossintelligibility in writing translates to crossintelligibility in speech. As for "On the day that I have to translate a paper into British English, I will see some more weight in your argument", you are forgetting the timescale being considered here, as it is unlikely that overall dialect divergence *in writing* in English would reach such a point any time soon. The matter is, though, that such doesn't mean that such *won't* happen, as it almost certainly will, even if such is hundreds of years off.

Quoiqu'hypothétique, l'argument avancé par Travis est parfaitement recevable . A voir donc...

greg, könntest du mir das auf Deutsch neu sagen?

Das sollte oben nicht "Travi" sondern "Travis" sein.

<<The only evidence you have given to support this is some dialect variation and vowel shifting. How does that make a langauge unintelligible? If everyone knows how to understand all the dialects, everyone can still communicate. It is still quite possible for someone speaking AAVE and someone speaking Australian English to communicate even if neither can speak the other dialect.>>

Yes. For the time being. And certainly for the rest of our lives and the foreseeable future. However, what seem like small changes from our perspective really do add up over time. Linguistic evidence and research has proven English dialects are drifting further apart rather than closer. Travis makes a good point with California and Northern Inland English, which as of no more than two generations ago were much more alike than they are today. I've mentioned before I heard an old recording of a young Judy Garland (born 1920s), who was from northern Minnesota, and she sounds very different from the northern Minnesotans I've met in my lifetime. In fact, if her voice didn't sound youthful in the recording, the overall impression I would've gotten would've been that she sounded pretty much like any elderly Californian (and possibly, Minnesotan) today. Major shifts have gone on in both varieties and continue doing so and spreading. This despite the spread of mass media and the high mobility of residents of the US. Travis also made a good point about Australian English, which in recent years has been noted by linguists to indeed have some regional variations (altho still on a relatively small scale for now), when it's traditionally been known as a country "without regional dialects" but class dialects.

The point is, language change is inevitable and as dialects inevitably drift apart, there's no way of avoiding the fact that some day they will reach a point where intelligibility will gradually become more difficult over the years and decades. I believe this is still far off for world English dialects, but it will happen.

Standard writing, as always, will be much easier in terms of crossintelligibility and will be much more similar amongst different varieties (it already is--overall there are quite few differences in standard formal written English according to dialects), but the written language should be divorced from any serious consideration of actual language change, which is involved in the spoken language.

Here's a cool diagram related to all this:

http://www.immi.gov.au/amep/reports/pubs/papers/peters/figure5.gif

(and this is just illustrating what has already happened, not just what will happen, but there's no reason to believe the different varities will start becoming more similar to each other--in fact that's the opposite of what will happen).

<<greg, könntest du mir das auf Deutsch neu sagen?>>

He basically said your argument is perfectly plausible.

<<To be fair, the differences between European and Latin-American Spanish are far greater than British>>

I would imagine that you are either a native castilian speaker or have achieved a high level of fluency in the language to make such a statement. Do you care to elaborate how you arrived to this conclusion?

Travis und Kirk : genau !

Kirk, one note though is that some isolated sections of Northern Central and Northern Inland American English dialects today, in particular those from North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, may likely have more outside substratum influence than Californian English today. This is because Californian English is not solely derived from dialects from areas with significant substratum influence historically, due to having influence from dialects spoken in other parts of the (Upper) Midwest, such as Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana. However, such probably was even moreso 50 years ago than today, as such substratum influence was likely not as diluted then as today, as indicated by things such as the loss of /w/ and /v/ merger amongst younger individuals in some dialects which historically had such. But anyways, as a result of such, one cannot compare any given dialect in the Upper Midwest to any given dialect in California today, but rather one must compare the "average" of the dialects spoken throughout both.

Yes, Californian English was essentially borne of a mixture of Upper Midwest dialects as they were 50-100 years ago, due to large-scale Midwest immigration (including people such as my grandma, whose family moved to California from Minnesota when she was in high school in the late 1940s-early 1950s). I know I've mentioned before that for a time in the first half of the 20th century, the Los Angeles Harbor was only half-jokingly referred to as the "Port of Iowa" due to the sheer number of Iowans who had come to the LA area. So yes, you really can't directly trace any specific dialect's dominance in a direct way to Californian English of 2005, as there was a lot of mixing that went on. But, what I was referring to before was that several features now common in various Upper-Midwestern dialects are nowhere to be found in Californian English, as they've developed largely after the period of massive Midwestern immigration to California. The same could be said of Californian English, which has some features not found in the Upper Midwest (or in other areas, for that matter), so they've been relatively recent developments (as in the past few decades or maybe even more recent).

>> It is almost certain that in the long run North American English and English English will develop into separate, as in noncrossintelligible, languages. <<

>> Did I say that the two would become noncrossintelligible in the near future?<<

Aoparently, you did. In the long run can't mean ``a thousand years from now'' or it has no meaning at all. You then changed your mind, in light of the fact that the languages show no signs of becoming non mutually intelligible, and decided that this would happen so far into the future that we can only see the slightest signs of it at the present.

I think there is a higher chance that everyone will start speaking Hindi or Chinese than that American and British English speakers won't be able to understand each other, and I have just as much evidence as you have: none.

I understand that exactly, and that was what I was originally saying. I was just adding a minor caveat to what I was originally saying, with respect to the overall distribution of dialects which Californian English was originally derived from, and with respect to one having to view those as an overall averaged whole, rather than individually.

I expect no trend towards unintelligibility across dialects of English in the future. I expect the opposite, in fact: convergence on a handful of "standard" versions of English, and possibly just one. While there will always be regional accents and vocabulary and other minor differences, eventually everyone is going to be speaking pretty much the same English. And once everyone speaks English well, they are going to speak other languages less and less, until everyone speaks English exclusively. This may take an extraordinarily long time, but if current trends continue, that will be the final result.

Of course, world circumstances could shift other languages into the dominant position, but there is no sign of that happening in the foreseeable future, and today's extremely high-speed, worldwide communications work in favor of maintaining English as the dominant language, by greatly accelerating its spread and increasing its inertia. Even the United States may no longer be necessary to support the trend (the UK hasn't been on the radar in a hundred years).

>> but the written language should be divorced from any serious consideration of actual language change, which is involved in the spoken language. <<

I know that linguists prefer the spoken language over the written, which makes sense because most langauges are exclusively oral. But English is not exclusively oral, nor even primarily oral at large distances. The bulk of the communication I do with people from England is in our common language: written standard English. That's the language I am using right now.

As long as American and British English speakers can both write standard English, they will be able to understand each other's English by code-switching to their common language, which is ... English.