11 The future of language

As you saw at the start of this course, compared to the history of human language generally, English is relatively young having been around for just one and a half millennia. But in that time, it’s grown from a parochial language spoken by a few north European tribes to one used across the globe and spoken, to some extent or other, by over two billion people – not to mention a number of robots. As things stand at the moment, it’s the pre-eminent global lingua franca, and is viewed by a large proportion of the world’s population as being an important resource for prospering in life. This is not to say that its status in the world is unproblematic. There’s plenty of criticism of the way the language is a divisive force in societies, and how it helps the main Anglophone countries wield soft power across other parts of the world.

So what’s the future of English likely to be? And what part will it play in the future of human language more generally? As you’ve noted time and again, language is one of the essential characteristics of what it means to be human. It’s the foundation for our culture and civilisation. But with the rapid rise of new communication technologies, there’s been speculation in some parts that language as we know it may become obsolete in the near future.

In the last video in this course, you’ll look at all these questions.

Activity 12

Before watching the video, have a think about the following questions:

• What are the main factors that will likely influence the future of human language and communication?
• Should we be worried about some of the changes that will likely happen to the way we communicate in the future?
• And if we have concerns about how things might develop, is there anything we should be doing now to prevent our worst-case predictions coming true?

After you’ve watched the video, jot down any thoughts you have about this in the text box below. Once you’ve done so, save your answer and then read the comment.

Now watch the video.

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Transcript: Video 13 The future of language

SPEAKER 1

Cassandra News Productions presents, The Future of Language-- the march of progress never stops. Our species, Homo sapiens, is forever on the move. Since the 1900s and ’90s, we’ve witnessed a revolution in the way we communicate. As our tools of communication change, so too does our language.

SPEAKER 2

And as our use of language changes, so too does the shape of society itself. When we look around our world today, we can see the positives and negatives of this relentless march of progress all pushing us inexorably towards the future. So what can we expect language to look like in 10, 50, or 100 years time? And how will this future language transform the way we live, and perhaps even transform civilisation as we know it? The only constant when it comes to language is change. All languages are continuously changing. There are two main reasons which drive this change. The first is the relationship language has with society. As society changes, so too does language and vice versa. The second is its relationship to technology. With new technologies, come new forms of language and new ways of using it.

One of the obsessions throughout history has been the idea that one day we’ll all be able to speak a universal language. Over the centuries, this dream has produced several different solutions. There have been the philosophical languages of the late Renaissance, the auxiliary languages like Esperanto in the early 20th century, and the rise of English as a global language in the second half of the 20th century. But whatever relative success some of these have had, none of them has ever achieved a really universal status. Today though, perhaps technology can solve this age-old problem through the use of machine translation and artificial intelligence. These are ways of harnessing the computational power of digital technology to manipulate huge amounts of data in order to analyse human speech.

There are other ways in which artificial intelligence is already changing language, with things like autocorrect and predictive text, which supposedly help us compose messages. But there are even more radical ideas in development as well. These include brain computer interfaces, where sensors are placed around or under the skull to read the way the brain processes our thoughts. With this sort of technology, you can type directly with your mind. And perhaps, one day, you'll be able to transfer your thoughts directly to another person without needing to speak or write at all. There are lots of possible advantages to these sorts of innovations. They can help with speech impairments, for example, and make communication around the world ever easier and quicker. But despite the advantages, whenever a new technology emerges, there's nearly always a panic in the media about whether it’s ruining language and if it’s undermining our culture and civilisation.

This has been the case with each new innovation and each new generation. But in each case, the language is simply changing rather than decaying. That’s not to say we shouldn’t worry about the way language is developing, but our focus shouldn’t be on whether apostrophes are going to become obsolete or whether no one uses the subjunctive properly anymore. It should be about what this increased incursion of computer technology into the way we use language might mean for things like surveillance and control.

What we should be wary of is what it means if a private company is sitting directly between our thoughts and our ability to express those thoughts. What it would be like if technology was constantly nudging us to speak in a particular way, and whether we want to live in a world in which everything we say, write, or think becomes data that can be monitored by a computer. But whatever the future brings, we can be sure that the human race will find ways to adapt to it. And that language, in one form or another, will remain central to our identities as human beings.

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End transcript: Video 13 The future of language

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Comment

The biggest agent of change is almost certainly going to be technology. You’ve seen throughout this course that the history of language use has been shaped from the very beginning by developments in communications technology. As the animation argues, there are a lot of scenarios we can imagine which will have profound significance for our lives. These include whether machine translation will make learning a foreign language redundant; whether a mixture of brain-computer interfaces and artificial intelligence will mean that we’ll soon be able to talk to each other via computer-enabled technology. And how all this will affect issues such as privacy, surveillance and the future shape of society. All of these come with potential benefits and potential risks – and our challenge over the next few years and decades will be trying to ensure that the former outweigh the latter.