The Future of English

Geographically, English is the most widespread language on Earth, and it is second only to Mandarin Chinese in the number of people who speak it. The itu (the Inter­national Telecommunication Union) has four official languages: English, French, Spanish, and Russian. The influence of these languages upon one another will in­evitably increase.

It is reasonable to ask if changes in English can be predicted. There will doubtless be modifications in pro­nunciation, especially in that of long vowels and diph-Factors thongs. In weakly stressed syllables there is already a leading discernible tendency, operating effectively through radio toward and television, to restore the full qualities of vowels in conformity these syllables. This tendency may bring British English more into line with American English and may bring them both a little nearer to Spanish and Italian. Further, it may help to narrow the gap between pronunciation and spelling. Other factors will also contribute toward the narrowing of this gap: advanced technological education, computer programming, machine translation, and ex­panding mass media. Spelling reformers will arise from time to time to liven up proceedings, but, all in all, traditional orthography may well hold its own against all comers, perhaps with some regularization. Printing houses, wielding concentrated power through their style directives, will surely find it in their best interests to agree on uniformity of spelling. Encyclopaedic dictio­naries—computerized, universal, and subject to continu­ous revision—may not go on indefinitely recording such variant spellings as "connection" and "connexion," "judgment" and "judgement," "labor" and "labour," "medieval" and "mediaeval," "plow" and "plough," "real­ise" and "realize," "thru" and "through."

Since Tudor days, aside from the verb endings -est and -eth, inflections have remained stable because they represent the essential minimum. The abandonment of the forms thou and thee may encourage the spread of yous and youse in many areas, but it is not necessarily certain that these forms will win general acceptance. The need for a distinctive plural can be supplied in other ways (e.g., the forms "you all, you fellows, you people"). The distinctions between the words "I" and "me," "he" and "him," "she" and "her," "we" and "us," "they" and "them" seem to many authors to be too important to be set aside, in spite of a growing tendency to use objective forms as emphatic subjective pronouns and to say, for in­stance, "them and us" instead of "they and we" in con­trasting social classes. Otherwise, these distinctive forms may remain stable; they are all monosyllabic, they are in daily use, and they can bear the main stress. They will therefore resist levelling processes.

Considerable changes will continue to be made in the forms and functions of auxiliary verbs, catenative (Unk­ing) verbs, phrasal verbs, and verb phrases. Indeed, the constituents of verbs and verb groups are being more subtly modified than those of any other word class. By means of auxiliaries and participles, a highly intricate system of aspects, tenses, and modalities is gradually evolving.

In syntax the movement toward a stricter word order seems to many to be certain to continue. The extension of multiple attributives in nominal groups has probably reached its maximum. It cannot extend further without incurring the risk of ambiguity.

In vocabulary there will be further increases, if the present trends continue. Unabbreviated general dictio­naries already contain 500,000 entries; even larger dic­tionaries, with 750,000 entries, will be required soon. Coiners of words will probably not confine themselves to Greek and Latin in creating new terms, but they will exercise their inventive powers in developing an inter­national technical vocabulary that is increasingly shared by Russian, French, and Spanish and that is slowly emerging as the universal scientific language of tomor­row.