Comment on Assuming humanity last another few hundred years; How many human languages do you think are gonna be left in 100 years? In 200 years?

shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Spoken, live languages? Very damned few. Archived languages? We might do pretty well.

In my lifetime I’ve seen accents disappearing in America. When I was doing tech support in the early 90s, I played a game of guessing what state a person was from. Did quite well! I could almost always match their accent. (Midwestern was my kryptonite, very generic.)

We’re seeing regional accents and dialects disappearing very quickly due to the internet, and formerly, TV in general.

For example; I haven’t heard a deep Cajun accent in ages, unless I look for it on YouTube, and even then it’s mostly intelligible. I talked to people 25-30 years ago I could not comprehend, and I’m good at languages!

Another example; Go watch Steel Magnolias from 1989. (Great movie BTW!) That deep, proper, Mississippi female accent is all but gone except for the oldest, and those women only use it amongst each other.

In any case, English seems to rule the internet, a modern lingua franca, don’t see that changing any time soon.

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