The future of the English language

New Scientist last week had an article about the future of the English language. If you're not a subscriber you'll only be able to read the first part of the article, but basically it talks about the impact on the language of English being spoken by more non-native than native speakers (i.e English is a second language for more people than a first language). Two thousand years ago, Latin was the language of the Roman Empire, but now it has disappeared as a 'living' language, with languages such as French, Italian and Spanish evolving from it into fully fledged languages in a relatively short span of time. What will happen to English? Will it become like Latin and go into Australian English, Indian English, African English etc, or will we all understand each other? The article of course is at pains not to completely predict the future, an inexact science! One interesting aspect that could demonstrate what happens is irregular verbs. Irregular verbs are those that don't take on an '-ed' ending when in the past tense. The report quotes from a study in the magazine Nature (you can read the abstract here in which an evolutionary mathematician at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Erez Lieberman, tracked 177 irregular English verbs from ancient times. Most common verbs are in fact irregular (be, have, go, do, say, take, get, will, see) but over time 79 irregular verbs have become regular. The last one - help. Now it's helped but it used to be 'holp'! The next one to go - 'wed'. Fascinating stuff. It's interesting to hear different age groups and people with different accents and see how things have changed. Unlike French, English has no central authority to 'control' its use - if such a thing were indeed possible. This means our language is constantly evolving into what we, the users, make it into. Let's see what we've made it into in 50 years' time.