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The Future of Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| CaucusWolf Senior Member United States Joined 5273 days ago 191 posts - 234 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Arabic (Written), Japanese | Message 1 of 13 13 April 2011 at 3:38am | IP Logged | ||
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Today I saw a very odd movie called 'Code 46'. I thought it was going to be immediately interesting because in the begining credits it had each category such as director etc in English, Spanish(I think), Arabic and Chinese. In the movie the characters said hi and various things in different languages such as the Spanish word for boy and girl and even things like "whats that" in Italian.
The languages spoken were English(of course) Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Mandarin, and french. (there could have been more I don't remember) The languages were mixed(in a very interesting way too) because aparently on this Earth all of the languages assimilated in this way. Unfourtunately, this was the only interesting thing about the movie because it was horrible. Do you think that one day our descendants may be speaking a mix of English/Arabic/Spanish/Mandarin/etc? I think it's entirely possible and maybe even likely that we could see languages comming together in languages since the world is migrating and trading more. Edited by CaucusWolf on 14 April 2011 at 4:15am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5833 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin | Message 2 of 13 13 April 2011 at 9:30pm | IP Logged | ||
No, because most of our ancestors (depending on how you define the word) are already dead. :) Or were you thinking about languages spoken in the afterlife? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5321 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 3 of 13 13 April 2011 at 10:55pm | IP Logged | ||
Only if someone travels back in back in time and convinces them that Bladerunner is a documentary and that Cityspeak is the way to go. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| CaucusWolf Senior Member United States Joined 5273 days ago 191 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Arabic (Written), Japanese | Message 4 of 13 14 April 2011 at 4:15am | IP Logged | ||
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I meant descendants* BTW thanks for the virus site ;) Edited by CaucusWolf on 14 April 2011 at 4:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| yourvietnamese Newbie Singapore yourvietnamese.com Joined 4981 days ago 9 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English | Message 5 of 13 14 April 2011 at 11:18am | IP Logged | ||
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I think your suggestion is a nice one.
I'm living in Singapore and the fact that Singaporean can mix so naturally English and Chinese is a corroborating example. Now, we should be careful to make any further conclusion from that, at least I've never seen any people mixing 3 or more languages in their normal conversations. And for a particular region, one language is enough, why many languages? As such, I think speaking many languages may be the corollary of the globalisation. That would mean many more people would be able to speak (to some extent) many languages, but not necessarily they'll mix so many languages in their daily conversations. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 6 of 13 14 April 2011 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Most languages are already a mix of several languages: English has had extensive French influence, Spanish had influence from Arabic, Mandarin is a mixture of several dialects, etc. Not to mention that there are different forms on English that are already influenced by other languages in various ways, same for Spanish, there are various (sometimes very distinct) dialects of Arabic, and so on and so forth. Languages are not clean cut unchangeable units; they form a continuum of various forms, they always change over time both internally and through influence from other languages, and they do so in different ways across the continuum.
If a pidgin is indeed formed from English, Arabic, Spanish and Mandarin as you suggest (and I suppose you picked those languages because of their weight in today's world rather than because of their geopolitical or commercial rate of contact), it's likely to occur in so many centuries that it's simply impossible to say on the one hand, what these language will look like then, and on the other, what kind of geopolitical weight each of those languages will have. In other words, languages do influence eachother all the time, but new languages being formed from several other languages over a short period of time only occurs under very limited conditions and in small delimited territories, so it's unlike it would yield the kind of results you mention. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| CaucusWolf Senior Member United States Joined 5273 days ago 191 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Arabic (Written), Japanese | Message 7 of 13 15 April 2011 at 2:27am | IP Logged | ||
Thanks, I also noticed on a lebanese channel called MTV, that they would start a sentence in English and end in Arabic and throw random English words around. It was a very strange thing to hear. @Arekkusu: The idea came from a movie called Code 46. Edited by CaucusWolf on 15 April 2011 at 2:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Aquila123 Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mydeltapi.com Joined 5307 days ago 201 posts - 262 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: Finnish, Russian | Message 8 of 13 16 April 2011 at 12:49am | IP Logged | ||
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It has ben this way for thousands of years.
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