Let’s face it. English as you know it is going to change. It’s inevitable. We don’t speak Shakespearean anymore. The transcripts you read from early medieval times are even a little difficult to understand at times. But is this linguistic evolution mostly the impact of culture (nurture)?
I came across this interesting essay on what the english language may look like in 3000AD.
Predicting the future of the English language is rather easy, in the short term. The odds are, over the next few decades its New World dialects are going to gain increasing global dominance, accelerating the demise of thousands of less fortunate languages but at long last allowing a single advertisement to reach everybody in the world.
Then after a century or two of US dominance some other geopolitical grouping will gain the ascendancy, everyone will learn Chechen or Patagonian or whatever it is, and history will continue as usual. But apart from that… what might the language actually look like in a thousand years time?
Incidentally, the last article I read on this topic was Wired’s piece on How English is evolving into a language we may not understand.