Subject : ELT 202: The Development of English Language

Topic : The Future of English Language

Reporter : Rosie L. Lopez
Professor : Dr. Josie C. Asinas

The Future of English Language

Who will speak English in the future?

The best way for us to address this sort of question is to look at the trends in the global speaking
population today and try to extrapolate from there toward a picture of the future English speaker. So what
is actually the state of English today? It might surprise a lot of native speakers that they are among the
minority of the world’s English speaking population. As of 2010, there are about 1.4 billion people
speaking English as the second language. This is understandable right now because the English language
is already seen as a universal second language and it is not uncommon for children of other countries to
study in their schools as they would have other subjects like Music and Math. In fact, another piece of
trivia that surprises a lot of native English speakers is that the world’s largest English speaking country is
not any of the following: United States, England or Australia. It is China. (And before China, was
India.)This preponderance of non-native speakers of English is most likely going to continue so that in the
future experts predict that by 2020, only 15% of world’s English speaking population will be made of
native speakers which means that in the future it is quite likely that the English language can be thought
of as the world’s universal second language.

How will the language be different in the future?

We only have to look at Old English once or twice to realize that it is very different from the
Modern English that we speak today. This makes sense because when we think about it, English is a
living language. It is dynamic. It transforms according to the way people use it .The English of the future
is going to be the same way. Now, we already knew that the English speakers of the future will most
likely be the non-native English speakers and we only have to look at present day differences between
English in the United States and English in the United Kingdom to know that English dialects will arise
and they will begin to diverge. For instance, we have already got different slang in the U.S. versus in the
U.K.. There is a trunk of the car in the U.S. while there is booth of the car in the U.K. And these are based
on the same language. So how different will English be when the majority of the world speaks it as a
second language? What we will most likely be going to see, according to a linguist, David Crystal, and
other people who study on this, is that the emergence of new English dialects that have been affected by
the native language of the speakers who speak English as a second language. It means that instead of
having dialects of diverging slang, we will probably be having dialects with diverging rules of grammar
or rules of syntax. We will have dialects affected by a pre-existing non-English language and the trend
could accelerate to the point that in the future instead of one standardized version of English, we will have
multiple versions of mutually unintelligible dialects based on the English language.

How will the internet affect the evolution of the English language?

When we try to look at how the internet will change English language in the future, we do have
some historical precedence in a way the printing press changed communication but we also have a huge
“X factor” and that “X factor” is that the internet is so new. For instance, we understand that there is an
array of amazing formats like Tweets, Status updates, Blog posts, Foursquare check-in, etc. These all
demand a different sort of writing styles due to the constraints of the format and the audience that we
want to communicate with. But there are other things that the internet allows us to do when we
communicate. For instance, when we are sending an email or message to a friend and we want to mention
a scene from a particular movie, with the internet, instead of writing “Hey, do you remember that scene
with …”, all we have to do is take a link or embed a video of the scene we are talking about and so now
we have of what we might think of as a visual vocabulary. The idea on how this is going to play out in the
long term is still uncertain but it could be very much the case as the linguist, David Crystal, argues that
we will end up with a language that is more expressive in the future.