Will language ever change again?

[Melooon]

This is not a new idea,  but I'm curious to hear how people feel about the idea of language and design changing over time.

We are now just about 100 years into the era of humanity having recorded images and sound; we can hear and see the voices of people who are no longer alive. When we are growing up we watch movies, some of which are older than the average human lifespan (Classics like Its a Wonderful Life), and we can see and hear people from the past as if time had never touched them!

There is a long standing suggestion that because of all this, language and design have reached their final point of change; from now on we will probably speak similarly to the people we see in recorded media; for as long as recorded media exists. Little things will change, slang will come and go, but the core languages we speak will stay similar enough that a person in 100 or 500 or even 1000 years may still be able to watch an 80s movie and understand it naturally.

Do you think this is the case? And as a web crafter, how do you think it affects the web (if at all)? Will websites still be render-able in the future? Will the aesthetic choices and design ideas still be repeating? Will new generations keep modding gameboys forever? 

[dream]

I think media is a collective consciousness buffer that will stabilize language but still allow it to evolve, less based on forgetting, and more based on what resonates in the form of popular culture.

In this way, I regard media as the random access memory for the whole of humanity.

[candycanearter07]

I think the internet will make it change even faster, honestly. Just look at all the weird words they've made up on TikTok.

[Dreamwings]

Going on a bit of a tangent here, but I've done a whole lot of researching and hunting and viewing of old media from the late Victorian-Edwardian era (a literal century ago) and the thing with it is is while the language and demeanor and everything has changed greatly, the humanity is the same.    They're like, the same as people today, just written about and dressed differently because social standards in general were very different. You can see it a lot in videos especially, when people are moving, and go "Hey wait, those are other people!" Because just reading about and seeing still pictures or art kinda gives the idea that people were very different or very far removed from us today when it really wasn't the case. It's really cool, actually.
One standout moment in particular was this one recording of some ironworkers making some sort of large metal disc for some sort of purpose. The company was recording them to show off a bit I think (this was still the era when video cameras were a rarity), there were a few others in the collection by the same company in different places. But I remember one ironworker in particular kept turning to stare at the camera, just sort of confused and trying to see what the hell the thing pointed at him even was (because obviously he had never seen anything like it before). I still think about that a lot. How this random guy who I'd never meet, who died long before I was born, who I'd never even know the name of, a completely unremarkable person by all historical accounts, was immortalized and far into the future, I, some kid 100 years later, could see him today on machinery he would never have been able to comprehend. What he thought was a mildly weird day and then probably not much else I can see now in fascination. And moreover, I could see him and all of his coworkers at all, in the moment. Of course there is film degradation but I could see it. As you said, a window in time. It's so cool.

To go back to the topic though of language (I'll just be talking about English though since that is what I know), outside of formalities and what is and isn't considered appropriate, in the grand scheme of things it hasn't changed too much since maybe the 1940s? Probably sooner but I'm going to go with a safe estimate. There are still words that have changed their meaning as time has gone on since then for example, but not enough to considerably say it an evolution in my opinion.
I feel like for it to evolve it would have to be maybe 300 more years for all of those standards and formalities to completely change. We're not far enough removed from the past to have it fully be different yet.
And as for being able to understand it, I think it would be closer to maybe like, older Shakespeare for example. A normal person can't read it very well but someone who knows the rules and words of older English can. There is way too much documentation in my opinion for it to become completely lost but to a common person it might be (or at the very least a lot harder to decipher).

I think the internet will make it change even faster, honestly. Just look at all the weird words they've made up on TikTok.

I disagree. Those are slang terms. Generally they just swap in for other words in the place (stop the cap = stop lying, fanum tax = I'm taking your food, etc). Slang doesn't change the base underlying language. If you look at say, a move from 3-4 decades ago where people use said slang terms, I feel like it is more comparable to that. The reason though why it seems like there is such an excess in comparison to previously is because 1. You're living through it right now 2. On the internet time and media moves a lot quicker than they did prior because of how fast the communication is in general and 3. Slang has always been more common amoung common people. To go back to the old media hunting, an annoying thing about researching time periods like the Victorian or Edwardian era is back then education wasn't as common so a lot of the normal people didn't know how to read and write, only the rich did. And even if someone did happen to know how to read and write, it's not like said writings would have survived. So as such the window we have is small and only from the perspective of those privileged enough to write (and have the time to write and have the power to have their records survive into the future). If you didn't know any better you'd think the past is all ballrooms and pretty ballgowns and things like that. Plus any other outside culture that is written about is biased and from the perspective of someone not living through it, which leads to lots of inaccuracies, or a lack of information on things that would have been happening that would have only been known to those living through it. This is also part of the reason why the olden times come off as so formal (I mean, people were more formal but especially more formal), because it's primarily written about by rich people who were more formal because they would be bankers and royals and politicians and other high up positions and the children of those people that required that formality. It's the equivilant of the only records of this time period surviving being the videos and writings of all of those fancy rich YouTubers who live in those white stainless mansions, because none of us were allowed or too broke to be on the internet. Now that we have the internet and are generally more educated, said slang is able to move around a lot more frequently because we are the ones writing it and then using it in what is basically a virtual town, colloquially, not limited by just published media where you can't portray reality 100% unless if it's a documentary.
If we kept stacking slang on slang like now, then progressively it would change, but it still would take years and constant usage for it to become so. We don't say YOLO or Flamed/Flaming anymore but we do still say Aggro or Kiting (only ones I could think of still in use are video game related but the point still stands 😭). If the slang keeps swapping out, it will just remain slang. What turns slang into an actual word is if it is still used into the future and few of those terms will make it that long.

[Memory]

yep! language is changing all the time! i mean, the "standard american accent" now is really different from what it was a hundred years ago. something written in the 1920s is markedly different from something written in the 2020s, across medium and genre; it's intelligible, but still obviously written in a different voice.
we don't speak the way people speak in recorded media! if you met somebody who talked like a 1930s newscaster they would not sound "normal" at all. you'd probably recognize that they were talking like a 1930s newscaster, but it still be weird. i would think so, anyway. i would think, "this person is talking like a 1930s newscaster!" and not "what a normal unremarkable fellow english-speaker, talking normal-style!"

it takes a reaaaaaaaaaaaally long time for language to completely change to the point of total incomprehensibility i think. the canterbury tales is written in middle english, 600+ years old, and if you squint at it and sound it out it's almost coherent to a casual speaker of modern english.

having lots and lots of recorded media from this current era of modern english will help it stay comprehensible for a long time i think, but i think our overreliance on purely-digital archives also means that some pretty big swathes of internet language and the required context for deciphering it will be lost relatively quickly! it's hard enough already to figure out what people are talking about right now, imagine how hard it'll be when twitter and reddit don't exist any more.

I disagree. Those are slang terms. Generally they just swap in for other words in the place (stop the cap = stop lying, fanum tax = I'm taking your food, etc). Slang doesn't change the base underlying language. If you look at say, a move from 3-4 decades ago where people use said slang terms, I feel like it is more comparable to that.

hmmmm but "slang" is not completely separate from a dialect, and mainstream movie english is also not necessarily the "underlying language" that is being changed by new slang! a mainstream film is not necessarily an accurate representation of how people actually speak, especially slangwise - it's pretty uncommon for films to incorporate a lot of slang or dialects! films that do incorporate slang tend to not go over very well with audiences. (the dialogue in juno was Very polarizing for example, some people really hated it!)

like, aave is a dialect of english that changes a lot over time and a lot of pieces of it get incorporated into other englishes as well. i think saying that "slang" "just" swaps words in is doing a disservice to youth vernacular and to the various dialects that youth vernacular is taking from. the grammar often isn't the same - "no cap" can be transposed into "no lie", and both of those are using grammatical structure from aave rather than "standard" english. when slang includes adoption of alternative grammatical structures as well as vocabulary it is in fact making changes to the underlying language in my opinion~ the changes are small but add up considerably over time! 


most subcultures use specialized language that is kind of slang but also kind of a dialect and also kind of something else! (something like "iso t9 3-4l UC UFT && RW MS UFQA"; "omg orz orz soz 4 afk bb *huggles*"; "tfw oomf vagues my dni -_- r u fr /lu" of course, but also just various hobbies use specialized language when talking about their areas of interest or expertise, some of which include alternative definitions of words (a geologist who is "interested in cleavage" has to be mindful of their terminology when talking to non-geologists)

if you speak a particular dialect or spend all your time immersed in a particular subculture, then that "nonstandard" english is your standard! what counts as "the english language" is different from place to place and in different contexts. an old man speaking normally in scotland and a 13-year-old speaking normally in middle school in atlanta georgia and a canadian college graduate speaking normally in a zoom meeting at work are all speaking different variants of "standard english" with very different accents, vocabularies, and grammars! and those different englishes are going to incorporate new terminology and concepts in different ways, and change at different rates, and they might not be able to understand each other that well.


i think the internet gives us the ability to learn about other languages in a way that's really different from other forms of technology, because we have access to pseudo-private and colloquial communication in huuuuge numbers! that's really neat and very new! i think being able to have access to more variety of expression is really valuable, both in terms of understanding people around us and in expressing ourselves! it also means that subcultures and communities are not afforded the same level of insularity and privacy that they used to be, which means that our ability to separate ourselves from or make ourselves illegible to outsiders for safety, privacy, or any other reason is severely limited. any code or euphemism anyone might come up with to obfuscate certain activities from law enforcement, for example, is almost immediately rendered pointless by the rapid constant spread of language and slang. but the rapid spread also means that what any particular term means can (and does) change really quickly as it's bounced from context to context - what's funny about a particular meme, what is or isn't sarcastic, what a term refers to, etc.

it's an interesting spot we're in! the way people talk now in real life and online is really different from how people talked when i was a teenager. there's turns of phrase and insults and nicknames that were unremarkable and normal at the time and just have fallen completely out of use in only fifteen years or so. i think when you're inside of something that's changing it's easy to feel like it isn't changing at all, but if you look back it becomes obvious that it's actually very different.