It's weird how in about 4000 years English could be a long lost common ancestor to hundreds of complex and diverse languages. Makes you think that maybe PIE was just a small language that was apart of a much bigger family.
a part =/= apart Usually typos like this don't matter much, but their meanings are complete opposites of each other. If something is a part of something else, they are connected; if something is apart of something else they are separate.
I mean yeah. We have evidence of new languages and language families constantly flaking off of PIE since the very beginning. (such as Hittite) The only reason we can't go further back and trace more languages is that we run up to the limit of recorded history. If an entire language family dies out before any decendants have had a chance to be written down, we have no way of tracing the original language even indirectly.
English is spoken in so many places it will 100% become a whole tree. I mean Indian English is already not even mutually intelligible with more standard English dialects
Reading þis makes me wonder what the þree stages of English (Old, Middle, and Modern) will be called in future English as well as what future English will call itself. I would surmise þat ‘twould call itself “post-modern” English or someþing of þat sort.
Sound shifts also influence grammar. Two well known examples are Latin and Japanese. In Latin, the /o/ in the o-stem nominative and accusative singular became raised to /u/, which led to the u-stem declension assimilating to the more common o-stem class in Proto-Romance. On the other hand, Japanese had a native [p] shift to [φ → h] and then merge with [w] in the middle of a word but ultimately lost [w] outside of [wa] so that the original p-row verbs are now reflected as [wa e i u o].
That'll 100% happen for my region as grammatically we kind of forced to avoid the " He's " contract due to B here is one step from W/V, V here already has a bad habit of rounding high vowels. Every consonant that can mutate a vowel, will mutate it in some way. Our native F is on a course to slamming into /ɸ/, same with our P wanting to also be /φ/ this a mistake I make when speaking in Spanish for restaurants and flea markets where we make the mistake of /φ/, but /β/ is still made. Mostly due to trading in similar areas and eating in areas of both. The Spanish influence here maybe responsible for over-articulating p into φ as in market situations. That does happen to match similar sounds. I do predict our B will switch β then redo the cycle of V/W. Though I noticed our vowels are mutating dramatically and much less like their Spanish counterparts, but borderline German and Swedish. As we are already speaking with a more closed mouth sound often leading water being with a rhotic vowel in front, wash being worsh/warsh. So we'll speak with more vowels, though T and D OFTEN BREAK. We'll probably have irregular plurals and genitives for all coda t's and d's, and go through a vowel shift that was triggered as T and D couldn't be asked to articulate in final and middle positions.
@@MaoRatto where are you? By the way, speaking of over-articulation, I can see a future where Hindustani potentially shifts from having most of its breathy voiced series immediately like that. This is not altogether implausible, breathy voiced and voiceless consonants are commonly analyzed as having a similar voice onset time and so it is typologically rare for a language to have both and have held them for the millennia from Proto-Indo-European to Hindustani. In fact, over-articulation is known to cause aspirated stops to shift to (normally) unaspirated fricatives, and a shift from /pʰ/ to /f/ is already happening in native Indian words in Hindustani and other Indian languages with the stop as it has happened in Greek. And in Greek, it happened at all places of articulation, so once the labial column shifts, it may be difficult to avoid Hindustani and other Indian languages becoming pseudo-Castilian.
@@alsatusmd1A13 South Eastern more or less the border of Appalachia. North Carolinians typically come to our state often.... Which have similar features, but not as agressive with the removal of T and D. Though raise the pitch of their vowels in a similar way.
I learned about the whole p -> h/-w shift in Japanese not too long ago and it cleared a lot of things for me. は (topic marker) is a remnant of that which hasn’t changed in spelling, possibly due to the fact it can’t be used at the start of the sentence anyway and is technically akin to intervocalic voicing bc of [topic] + は + [clause]. Similarly, へ (particle) is [e], likely as pe -> we -> e (the w row only has [wa] as all the other w- syllables merged with the vowels).
@@tideghost In Japanese, it never had a massive issue with the writing vs. spoken form in that regard. Due to the shift, wasn't too dramatic for other words.
In Bengali, I've pronounced some words differently on accident. For example: "Taratari" (meaning quick or fast) - To "Tatari" due to fast pronunciation. "Jono" (meaning for) - To "Juno" "Ha" (meaning yes (this word is also nasalized)) - To "Ho" (also nasalized)
All of those follow common change patterns! Especially the last one, many nasal vowels have moved from A to O over history, so you're likely onto something!
Actually, the use of "mother", "daughter", and "sister" to describe languages happens to arise from the word for "language" in German being a feminine noun.
I can see word final plosive devoicing being a fully systematic thing for English - especially in the UK where i live since i already notice it pretty often and it'd make sense considering German also already has this feature
@@dr.seesaw8894 it's probably that there were always dialects or accents in which this occured. The plosive devoicing at the end words began at least at the end of the Old High German period. So I also think it is in many Germanic dialects a feature. In Icelandic voiced ð at the end is devoiced to þ. And also g at the end is similar to a soft German h or ch as in ach-Laut. And so on.
@@talideon My dialect is a relative of Irish, due to descedants in the Appalachian mountains. It does occur with anything postalveolar. Though we have gotten throatier and one step away from not being English in terms of vowels.
Polymathy and Language Jones have done videos explaining the IPA in a way that's easy to understand. I suggest you check them out. They also both have really good linguistic content in general
Not sure if someone else has already commented this, but for your example of using certain British words for convenience, I have a similar but opposite situation! I instead use "snobby" quite a bit, which I believe is a word more commonly used by Americans 😂
That's interesting! I'm American myself (and fairly representative of a small, obscure rural dialect that I'm a bit concerned is gonna go undocumented and vanish), and I've noticed that due to influence from some of my family (who have my dialect but read a lot of fantasy that uses more archaic English features and/or UK dialectical features, lots of 19th century American and British books, and modern books from the UK), influence from art, and influence from my partner (who grew up with one parent speaking a California Bay Area dialect of English and the other speaking a Scottish dialect), I have a few features of British dialects thrown into my speech and writing. I often default to UK spellings on things that have an OU over there where there's just an O over here (so I write colour, armour, that kind of thing for the most part, with some exceptions. I write harbour for things like "Harbouring a grudge," but "Harbor" for "Ships dock at the harbor."). I also say top up instead of top off, and say "Pants" and "Trousers" about evenly (if I had to guess which word applies when, trousers are nicer clothes like slacks or dressy stuff made of wool and whatnot, while pants is generic. So I have my green trousers, which are wool and get pressed between washes, and my green pants, which are cotton and make me look like I'm on BSG). If my partner is talking about getting crisps vs getting chips, I'll usually call both things chips (both the crunchy little slices in a bag that I call chips and they call crisps, and the soft little sticks I usually call fries that they call chips. I struggle to pronounce the word crisps, which is probably why I only half follow their lead in conversation there). But if I'm not around them, those revert back to being chips and fries (except when discussing fish and chips). Similarly, I call it soccer until I'm speaking with my partner, at which point it becomes football. I exclusively say "Autumn" and get confused for a minute when I see it called "Fall" (this literally just happened to me, I was just checking the schedule for my college classes, went to select the "Fall term," and had a split second where I actually wondered what the hell was falling over and where "Autumn term" went lmao). I find it fun to see which little words get swapped between dialects, because they're often so seemingly random!
@@marafty3776 Ah good to know and thanks for saying! :) I'm Northern Irish myself, but I've grown up with American media all my life. I remember hearing the word on various shows centered in the 2000's, although that may just have to do with the timeframe? Or maybe what state you're in? I'm really fascinated with stuff like that! ^^ 😋
5:40 this shift of which dialect is most prestigious has a good example in british english: until the 1960s, Received Pronounciation had the most prestige, and it was very much an upper class accent. for various reasons, it fell out of favour since then, and got replaced by Standard Southern British, a middle class accent. If you look at the royal family, Elizabeth and Charles were/are RP speakers, but William and Harry speak SSB.
This is about Indian languages which may not be relevant to European languages but I'd like to share what I know. At some stage in the development of Indo-Aryan languages all consonant clusters of Sanskrit were assimilation into doubled consonants. Later the doubled consonant lost its gemination and the preceding vowel lengthened. Interestingly if one of the consonants in the cluster is a fricative (i.e. sibilant) it made the other consonant in the cluster to become aspirated. Examples Sanskrit > Hindi akshi > akkhi > ākh hasta > hattha > hāth mushti > mutthi mastaka > mattha(g)a > māthā kaksha > kakkha > kākh ashta > attha > āth If there was no fricative then the same process happened but without adding aspiration. sapta > satta > sāt sarpa > sāp danta > dãt mitra > mīt Intervocal and perhaps postvocalic consonants were lost altogether. sūkara > sūar shata > sada > sau Note that Hindi kept reborrowing words from Sanskrit as Sanskrit was the language of religion and science. Some of these words borrowed centuries ago are semi-learned. In these words while the consonants were retained the consonant cluster was broken. varsha > baras karma > karam (the inherited word is kām) Modern Hindi also borrows words from Sanskrit but this time retains the structure.
I think ð will become an allophone of d in unstressed syllables in Swedish. I’ve noticed many young women (myself included) occasionally pronounce -ade (past tense suffix) as -að, for instance.
That's not surprising to me as Swedish to me sounds like my mother tongue at times. Except the many front vowels, but then again locally our front vowels occur due to 1. The closed mouth posture, 2. Ablaut as -an as our indefinite article has a habit of turning into /eøn/ To make words with front vowels like electric, much easier to hear/say.... Though the fate of /θ/ I notice I turn it into an F or ɸ. I notice that our labial sounds will shift into fricative versions, but notice we are developing rounded front vowels due to fricatives, but V here does sometimes cause some of our sounds to round the front sound.
• 7:18 I've noticed a similar thing happen in Polish: the 3rd person singular present of "to be" - "jest" often loses its final t, and is pronounced as /jɛs/. • I also see myself drop the g in the anlaut of interrogative "gdzie" - "where". • The sound of the letter "ł" (/w/) is also sometimes dropped or at least gets turned into a semivowel - for example "wołałem" - "I was calling (yelling) - /voa.ɛːm/. • A lot of children in Poland go to a speech therapist beacuse they notoriously can't pronounce ʂ and tʂ, thought some started calling it a "variant of speech" (???). A lot of these children then grow up and still keep on pronouncing them as /s/ and /ts/. • Though the next thing may be dialectal, I often hear people say /χ/ instead of /x/, usually before vowels.
hi im trying to learn polish :) i thought i'd noticed the ł not quite deleting, but losing its velar character and becoming [β̞] intervocalically. also i'm curious why you transcribed a long ɛ when i thought that usually it would be the stressed, penultimate vowel to be lengthened. also, how come you didnt mention denasalization of word final /w̃/? i think it's the most common one of them all. cheers :D
Similar to it. The sounds for my English often confuse /f/ and /θ/. Due to well, the frequencies when speaking overlap TOO MUCH, with another allophone of /f/ being /ɸ/ often showing up "fife, free, flea/flee, and over time will replace /f/ ". Same with B turning slowly into /β/ like in any situation with BR unlike deleting or metathesis. It typically shows up with R. P here does turn into /φ/ yet retaining aspiration due to using a Fortis/Lenis system, but does come at the cost of consonants often reducing in half of the words. T/D turn into glottals sometimes in middle and final positions, final vowels turn long if they have a glide in their final position. I remember being on the phone to get my spectrum interner fixed, and he couldn't tell I was saying " N or M " due to the vowel basically does nasalize into it. I do know that the city below me does nasalize, while here it is partially, but the vowels do slowly turn unround vs. rounded. Basic words like you; which should be /ju/, but we already had sounds like /ʏ/ existing in our vowels, but if a standard English /u/ shows up, normally here it has a tendency to be a switch of /ɪʉ/ if there was a /j/ historically, but shifting to a softer, but often the vowel itself corresponds to /ø/ so originally /u/, may have turned originally into /y/, but then lowered. Our K has been basically collapsing into /kx~x~χ/ depending on the context, Typically if it is V_C_V then yes it turns into /kx~x/, with a vowel raise. The "southern drawl " is strong in my accent, but often leading to T dropping where P, F, K exists. The stress has historically always stayed on first syllables, so most mid-western may shift it around. Though notice that basically unlike most accents, we kind of took 20-ish vowels and jumped above often leading to some round vs. unrounding due to dark L, weakening of T/D, R starting to geminate, light L turning into tapped r in a lot of words like " Cool " vs. " Cooler ". If /w/ breaks, well it turns into /ɯ/ like a simple expression like "Have a good one " turning into Have a good'/ɯ:n/. In fast conversations, T either if there aren't any vowels turning into almost stød, or /d/ if there are vowels. The mouth position has always been more closed. Some verbs like "have been" switch in the pronunciation to "œ/ hav βœ(m~n) or deleting the vowel entirely." The spoken form here has always been sounding like a stream of hiccoughs due to shoving most back consonants in the back or the T/D situation.
I pronounce /ˈvjɛ.d͡zɔw̃/ as [ˈvjɔm] and /ˈzjɛ.d͡zɔw̃/ as [ˈzjɔm] etc. I think it's emitting a part of the word stem I would assume. I also pronounce który and kto as chtóry and chto. I also noticed that I pronounce words like dzisiaj and wczoraj as dzisiej and czorej.
I’m interested in the possible effects of virtual assistants (Alexa, Siri) and chat bots (chatGPT, copilot) on actually slowing down language shift given their largely fixed nature. Ex: you have to speak carefully for Alexa to understand you and vice-versa Alexa’s voice is largely fixed in speaking style.
We're moving quick through the following stages: - there are no machines that can understand human speech; - robots understand us if we speak very slowly and use a controlled vocabulary; - robots usually understand us unless we speak too quickly (we are here); - robots understand clearly what everyone within microphone range is speaking all at the same time and can reply in any desired style This may or may not matter, but one thing I think we can be confident of is that "having to speak carefully so the robot understands" won't be true for long.
I'm Punjabi and I can speak Urdu. One change I've noticed is that I don't pronounce /ɦ/, even in formal speech. Where the [ɦ] used to be, there's now a low tone, so if I say /ɦã/ 'yes', I pronounce it has [ã̀] with a low tone. This, I think, is because of Punjabi. Punjabi is the first Indo-Aryan language to become tonal, and Punjabi is the majority language in Pakistan. So it would make sense that under Punjabi influence Urdu would become tonal as well. This is fascinating because Hindi would not become tonal because it is the majority language in India so it would not be (heavily) influenced by Punjabi. Maybe Urdu and Hindi would diverge into separate languages.
One change that I didn't mention in the original comment is that sometimes, my breathy-voiced stops merge with voiced stops and give off a low tone. So, if I say /bʱagna/ 'to run', I actually say [bàgna]. This is similar to what happened in Punjabi. Coincidence? I think not.
I suppose the most prominent sound changes we may find when we learn old and new languages are: ai>e, au>o, ke>che, ki>chi, dropping last short vowels. You may find nearly all of them in Latin, Arabic, Common Slavic and their descendants.
13:55 Progressive voicing assimilation is actually also found in Slavic languages, although less frequently. For example in certain sound combinations in Polish ("kwiat") and Czech ("tři"), and in eastern dialects of Czech.
i think it's because those sounds were originally sonorant-class (transparent to voicing due to being always voiced) before being fortitioned to fricatives, which allowed them to lose voicing in order to keep the cluster's voicing information intact.
as a speaker of southern british english, something i've started to notice which i personally haven't seen any mention of anywhere (if anyone knows of any, feel free to point me in the direction of any possible sources) is /h/ being "hardened" before /a/ and /ɑː/ i haven't noticed it in /aː/ or /ʌ/ (i'm pointing out /ʌ/, because at least in my speech, i have seven main vowel areas, with short, long, and diphthongised versions of each vowel, with /ʌ/ being the short equivalent to /ɑː/), nor in the diphthongs /aw/ or /ɑj/ before /a/ and /ɑː/, i'm hearing /h/ turning into [χ ~ ʀ̥], resulting in pronunciations such as [χaʔ ~ ʀ̥aʔ] for ‹hat›, or [χɑːʔ ~ ʀ̥ɑːʔ] for ‹heart› i've not really paid attention to the demographics of the people who pronounce /ha/ and /hɑː/ like that, but i've noticed it happening maybe 50-75% of the time in myself (young and female, but from the countryside, though within 20 minutes of a large town, and half an hour of a city)
That's weird as locally as a speaker with a Southern Appalachian accent. It's /k/ turning into /kx~x~χ/ depending on the consonants like clank, Using /χ/ in that situation due to the dark L. Though it seems like we are gaining more vowels due to the symptom of over-rhoticism leading to our words either 1. Being more closed in the mouth or 2. Gemination unintentionally. Though most of our labial sounds are shifting into fricatives, the back consonants are also doing the same, but much less for the voiced /g/ though when in context to the r, yes it does switch. T/D typically turn into almost a stød system in the singular/non-genitive, but if we break w's, they turn often into /ɯ/. So future for us it wouldn't be too hard to understand southern british, but confused with h's being our k's. Due to a harsh stress in first syllables.
Yes, I notice this too a lot. Especially in American English, but recently I started noticing it also in the British. The author of this video inserted that h at 9:02 or :05. Often this is in words like consonant, constantly, possible etc. It grinds my ears and I notice it constantly.
While linguistics is mostly just a side interest for me, this topic has a practical application to my field. I have worked in hazardous waste for decades and was hired into nuclear waste cleanup. Some of these wastes have half-lives of thousands of years (e.g. Pu-240 t1/2=6,560 year). The area I work sends drums wastes and grouted nuclear wastes to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, NM. Some effort has been put into predictive future languages to warn future humans to keep away from these wastes.
@@denisdooley1540 Oh cool, I’ve heard somewhat about this subject, that future humans might not understand what ☢️ or 🚫 means, or any modern words. Heard something about glowing cats, not sure if that’s a thing tho
@@watchyourlanguage3870 It would make for an interesting follow up video. I only know of it, I don't know a lot about it, but I went and found this from DOE. www.wipp.energy.gov/pdfs/How-Will-Future-Generations-Be-Warned.pdf
I do notice a few things about my speech, I am a late teen and not sure why I do it but- I silence some vowels between two non voiced consonants. thing the u (schwa) in suspicious. at the beginning of words like "its" I either pronounce the ih silent, or not at all, saying something like "ts interesting." or, in the word aforementioned "interesting" I say it like "intresting" some other speech things, I do notice in fast speech I roll the R, "I wouldn't have known" "i woulrr'n av known" and other cases where this applies. this is common actually, among youth, you can notice the popular gen z streamers doing it, as a meme and kinda just on accident. the silent vowel thing, when I speak to older people they think im mumbling. I am easily understood by younger people, I thought I was speaking fast but for those really reduced consonants, like schwa, and ih, i feel like are really easy to devoice. lmk your thoughts on it
I probably do all of those to some extent as well (I'm 23), and I always pronounce interesting as "intresting". If we were gonna be somewhat ambitious with the predictions, maybe we could use the first example of "tsintresting" to predict that Future American will develop "s" as some sort of third-person copulative prefix on adjectives (meaning "it's", essentially). The /d/ > [r] shift is also possible. Great examples!
This is a very good video. Some things that came to mind while watching: 13:14 I think an obvious example of a language which lacks [ŋ] as an allophone of /n/ before velar plosives is Russian. I speak Finnish near-natively, and the American "foot" vowel sounds very far from Finnish ö. I've recordeed myself pronouncing it (I speak American English natively), analyzed the formants, and I'd much rather transcribe it as [ɵ]. [ø] is simply too far front. Also, I think it odd that you find an affricate realization of English /t/ rare, as its usual pronunciation (for me, you, and many others) is already somewhat affricated. (I transcribe it [t͡s̆ʰ])
Yea I notice the affricate /t/ all the time in both myself and other speakers I think Dr Geoff Lindsey also predicted this will be a full sound shift as well in one of his videos for SSBE
My Polish grandmother also doesn't change n to ng before k and g! This leeds to words like 'punkt' sounding like she's beat boxing. Younger Poles do tho
I have analyzed for formants as well, and locally here. Œ, ø, including ö like between Swedish and German can occur. Words with -ment suffix often get said with the nasal œ with a start to tonal genesis or stød. As words with T shift into soft glottalization, but gains force with the word has a D. Often being throaty, and if the future is anything... We would end up in Danish situation with the most amount of vowels and pure instability. We never had stable sounds to begin with. T/D being able to glottalize in middle and final positions... Voiceless The gets mixed up with F due to having the same frequencies, The F itself is more closed in the frontal position or last syllable, Raising and falling being present in vowels, V having a habit of rounding vowels after it, B shifting into W or V, dark L being a reason to redo the umlaut system, Light L has a bad habit of turning into tapped r in V_C_V positions, nasalition and retaining Vowel + L in more words than most dialects... I believe as apart of the Eastern side of the USA, we will end up with a High vs Low German situation.
5:38 It seems like the tendency for language to move between high and low class could be modeled somehow by socioeconomic factors, though I haven't worked out what precisely. It seems like population density is a factor. In a high density population, job openings are scarce, so the tendency is for the lower class to imitate the upper class for job marketability. In a low density population, labor is scarce, so the tendency is for employers to make the workplace attractive and down-to-earth. We see this in recent English history, where IIRC non-rhotic upper class English words like "burst"->"bust", "curse"->"cuss" predominated in cities. Though this still doesn't explain how a sound law originates in an upper/lower class to begin with.
As a Russian sometimes I can notice how I pronounce words like Учитель/Teacher (Uchitiel’) more like Ущиель(Uschiel’), Преподаватель/Teacher (Pripadavatiel’) more like Реааватцель (Reaavatsiel’), Для/For (Dlya) like Ля (Lya), Собой/?myself? (saboi) more like Саой (saoi), Собираюсь/?Going? (sabiraius’) more like sairaius’… It’s weird, but it’s way easier to pronounce. Also, the Moscow pronunciation is considered pretty funny here, but at the same time Moscow is basically center of the country (in all aspects) Also, sometimes we pronounce “l” like “w”, and I just don’t know why. Happily its pretty rare.
recently i noticed that i pronounce the hard L as [w] too which made me think of how the Ł in Polish got shifted into that same sound from [ɫ], meaning that a similar change is not impossible to happen in the future of the russian language
Same thing bro. My reduction is not as heavy, but sometimes I drop some consonants in words like "сделает" (he/she/it will have done) as "деае(т)".A friend of mine sometimes says "паивет"[pəı'ʋʲet] instead "привет" [prʲɪ'vʲet].Being a person with a speech impediment (/r/ as /ʁ to the left, around velum/) I feel his pain so god damn much.
@@MonolingualBeta I couldn't pronounce the r when I was little. Now I can but it is usually subtler. And I pay attention of the many ways I and other people say this sound. It changes from word to word and depending on speed as well. If you do it more flowy it just sounds proper. Like perhaps the British would say this PROPer. The first r is half there and it's enough.
i sometimes make a mistake where ill say "he been working there" instead of "hes been working there." i usually correct it cuz it does make the grammar error part of my brain light up a bit every time, but thats probably a coming change in a few generations. i also habitually say "i been doing that" instead of "i've been doing that" in casual speech and it never sounds wrong to me when i notice it
To me, it sounds weird entirely. As locally here "He been working there " doesn't work due to weak sounds, though I notice we lenite B into W/V categories, normal V typically rounds or front vowels. So "he's" isn't really any an option. "He has been working there " is used, but phonetically the vowels are so broken that a standard "20" jumped into 5+ due to unrounding vs. unrounding and harsh umlauting. I am guessing you speak AAVE? I am an Eastern accent speaker. So our sounds just mutate, break T, K, P, and F. Just to demonstrate the brokeness quality of everything. "He has been working there" I am guessing you retain the "been?" part, here it is described as " mutated ". Been = /bœn/ ~ /bn/ ~ /bm/. Too many front vowels before it. Sounds like used the wrong word order unintentionally as here it would be. Never forgetting your apostrophes. Standard: ən ɪˈlɛktrɪk ˈskutər Regionally: 'eøn'ʌ:ɫɛtɾ̥(ə)χ̞ skød:ɾ̥ "an" switched to 'eøn due to a front vowel..
@@julienandross To me, AAVE is unintelligible due to not being stress based enough and uses regular tenses as... A good example of confusing if you use [is] vs. [are] if saying you is, or is you. The sounds here WOULDN'T WORK due to. Who wants to contrast /ø/ with /ɪ/ or /ɛ/? Do you see how messy that is? Like a question in AAVE ( I stole it ) Who you think you iscomin home at this hour? Here that question shifts into, " At this hour, who do you think you are for coming by just now" (If extremely late) " It's exactly the opposite. As normally keeping phrases on time in the front, person/people in the back, with the odd change in syntax to keep it in coda for the verbs. Anything to keep verbs in front for questions, actions in the back of a phrase. The English here was never influenced by AAVE, but kept an archaic syntax due to mountain isolation....
@@julienandross Or whenever they forget "an" vs "a", as it sounds like a prefix from my point of view. Hence causes confusion as the spoken form he does get contractions, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how languages can switch from 2 Genders to 3, then back 2 or 0 to 2 again. As the vowels here are just unstable. You locally here would be " jø ", but sound quality I would say dictates grammar or if a language has an unstable sound inventory, it make use more complex verbs for its own sake like German.
yeah like that sentence example you gave to me at first sounded wrong because i was reading it on my screen. then i read it out loud to myself with proper intonation and i got it immediatley. i think it really is just an exposure thing. the language seems to be much more inflection based and nuianced than standard english like me personally, id never say "who you think you is coming home this late?" thats just not how id say it. but i could totally hear someone in my family or a friend saying it and id get what they mean.
I've also done the plosive affrication. Mostly with /k/ but also /p/, not often with /t/ or if I do I don't notice it (I've watched videos about British people affricating /t/ into [ts] but for the life of me I can't hear it, even though I'm used to German's ), though the weird thing is that it's not something like /pf/ most the time but rather more like /px/, often before specific vowels. Doesn't feel comfortable before all vowels I mainly only do it in emphatic speech though, so my impression is that it's mainly just the aspiration being realised as /x/ instead of /h/ rather than actual true affrication. I do affricate T's a lot before /u/ but that's because I break /u/ into a frontal diphthong that causes it to palatise. Never heard /t/ or /d/ affricate before a syllabic R myself, young or old, so I don't personally think it'll become common. My bet is rather on the R going away before that happens to be honest, but it might stay regional to wherever you come from Makes sense to me as well, the /t/ and /d/ aren't actually merging with CH and J before R, they're merely becoming affricates which while similar to CH and J, do remain rhotic. It's like the aspiration devoiced the R of 'tr' fricatising it and becoming an affricate, and then this spread to D as well perhaps through analogy. So immediate contact is necessary, which it doesn't have before "syllabic R" because there's a vowel in the way. I could see it happening as you describe, but I doubt it'll become common anywhere except your local regiolect, which considering how marked your accent is wouldn't surprise me
One other thing that seems to be happening in English is a change in the agreement in number between verbs and nouns. More and more it seems, when someone says something in the pattern of [subject] of [noun] [verb], the number of the verb agrees with whichever noun is immediately before the verb instead of agreeing with the subject.
Just found your channel. I want to sincerely thank you for the well-written and well-edited captions, including the IPA. ❤ Really helps me a lot to be able to read along with audio.
Has anyone actually tested the ability to predict the future of a language? Like "based on historical linguistics we expect to see ______ in N years" and then waited N years to see if they were right? Linguistics is probably old enough now to have these studies right?
@@davidp.7620 that is not what I am suggesting. I am saying that a linguist should make a prediction about the actual future (like, the year 2050) and then we see in 2050 if it's correct
literally can't wait for the next video, i really wanna see it rn. i've always wondered about how my language might evolve but i kinda have no idea, somehow i can't really see or hear any sound changes
I speak finnish and I noticed that a lot of times my pronounciation of s between vowels turns to /z/ like the word for summer, kesä (/kesæ/) > /kezæ/. Or asia (/asia/) > /azia/. Sometimes I change the /h/ sound to a very clear /x/ sound but usually it comes after a vowel and it might be from influence of learning russian and german. All thanks to me speaking so fast that sometimes no one understands me
The glottis stop before words in German is a general feature and therefore not written. I recognised that more and more people by accident form a aspirated t before sch [ʃ]. They say things like, a t'schönen guten Tag. Das habe ich t'schon gemacht. I don't know why. And another thing in German due to mass migration, the closing of mid rounded or rounded vowels, also darkening most vowels to the back of your mouth.
im in gen z. i pronounce /t/ as /ts/ word initially sometimes (quiet but its there). i am not near aave speakers in the slightest but i have some of the same grammatical constructions and cluster shortening. my pronounciation of is /wəɹz/. /n/ followed by a sonorant will turn the sonorant into an affricate. i actually have noticed some diphthongisations in my way of speaking. examples are /æ/ becoming /eə/ before nasal consonants, and /i/ becoming /iɪ/ word finally. a way of showing some of these would be the word , which i would say in my regular speech as /t(s)eəndz/.
a good example of progressive voice assimilation is with the english word "disgusting", which some people may mispronounce as "discusting", but never "dizgusting"
I'm watching Love Is Blind UK & there are whole sentences that I have no clue what they're saying. Not to mention plenty of stand alone words or phrases that are obviously not the same in the UK as they are in the US (for example, they use "buzzing" for a state of excitement & I only use that word for that state of almost drunk)
In the Malay Malaysian when we speak in casual speech, we tend to shorten word and change some vowel and consonant, for example: Engkau > kau > ko Tidak > tak > ak Tahu > tau Hendak > nak Pergi > gi Sahaja > je We even do short form like, yang - yg bagi - bg malas - mls okay - k tak - x barang - brg etc Mostly we change grammar word and remove the vowel
I see this channel for the first time and it's very interesting. You said that languages diverge over time even if they are relatively seperated not necessarily completely seperated. My gut tells me that with the wide spread adoption of the internet that most English accents aren't going to diverge to the point of unintellagibility. The internet ist just too much used to cause a seperation big enough for that. This is of course only my gut feeling, but I would love to know your reasons why you think the internet (and in extend literature, songs, political speeches, memes, etc.) is not enough to prevent the divergence of English accents. Btw. I'm a native German speaker.
I think a very common fortition pattern is semivowels changing to fricatives or occlusives: /w/ to /v/ or /b/, and /j/ to /ʝ/ /ɟ/ /ʒ/ /dʒ/ etc. Another one I can think of is the adoption of prothetic consonants before zero onset syllables or between two vowels, but I'm not sure if that is technically fortition
My dialect is in the process of adopting /ʝ/ as we use it as an allophone of /j/, but W hasn't occured, our B will weaken into W or V. As I notice in casual speech, we just weaken all voiceless consonants and shove them into the back of the mouth.
I think the idea of ONE "future American English" might be slightly misguided. Pronunciation in English is more likely, in my opinion, to diverge into more localized groups, such as the Southwest, the South, the Midwest, the Great Lakes, New England (some of which, especially the ones settled earlier, have already carved out their own dialects).
American and British English will definitely continue to evolve and diverge in the future, But I personally think it unlikely they'd become mutually unintelligible, Any sort of cataclysm that increases the isolation notwithstanding. I suppose I can't speak for _all_ Americans, But I personally interact with Brits (And speakers from other countries, such as Australia or Ireland, Not to mention numerous non-native speakers from around the world) pretty regularly, As do many other people I know, And it's also fairly common that I consume it via media, Listening to British Music, watching British TV shows, Et cetera, So it seems very likely to me that even if the two varieties diverge enough that someone raised to one in isolation would be unable to understand the other, I suspect most Americans and Brits would be able to understand eachother for the foreseeable future just because of the continuing interactions they already have, Not to mention it's just useful to be able to communicate with people without needing to learn a new language or hire a translator (Although granted machine translation will likely be higher quality in the future, So translations might come free.)
I really doubt any dutch speaker would be able to understand casual afrikaans well in 100 years. Afrikaans vowels are really shifting currently and there's even tonogenesis happening.
What if English develops a easier standardized version like Arabic which could be used as the International Language and such, and English-speaking countries can continue their ever changing vernaculars, even my country (Philippines) a non-native english speaking country developed its own dialect in the past 100+ years since we’ve been penetrated by the Anglosphere…
That is what I would do for the USA. Make a standard version, but locally, people use their own dialects with ITS OWN unique written standard system. For example as an Easterner, we struggle to understand AAVE due to... Consonants are TOO DISTANT, vowels are too warped from their perspective. Just generally grammar is a case of " wrong sounds and words ". I noticed locally for us, we are turning K into /kx/ or /χ/ a soft /χ/. No longer having middle t or last syllable t's in our sound inventory... Same with D, basically commiting the crime of almost being closer to Danish, our vowels already growing. Though we would have to need a long vs. short in our script. Typically due to elision and lenition having been harsher or shifting sounds. light L's may just become tapped r's. As everyword with OO is basically a mess with little no to no constant sounds. Reading double OO is a death sentence if in some words. If Standard English has 20, we jumped that to 20 + 5 unrounded vowels, some nasal potentional for the 20 base pairs. I remember being on the phone to get my internet fixed, but we had to say Names just to have the letters " N " and " M " to be distinct as when saying " N and M" we are losing that contrast when a vowel is proceeds it while the town from us isn't as bad for the same loss of sounds. The vernacular here basically took English, rural yet archaic. The best way to demonstrate the brokenness quality... Standard English: ən ɪˈlɛktrɪk ˈskutər Regionally: 'eøn'ʌ:ɫɛtɾ̥(ə)χ̞ skød:ɾ̥ Standard: ɑkwə Regionally: ɔ̝xwo ( the final o is very much closed, but give it time, we will end up rising it ) This is the Eastern USA for my part of the country.
As a turkish speaker(wiþ very little linguistic knowldge), i haven't noticed much, so ill just put my predictions in a lil comment here: 1. R becomes more like english's r(more... flowy? I guess) 2. E always becomes pronounced /æ/ (Ill probably add more later but there are all the ones i can currently think of)
methinks she probably tried too hard, and people generally like to stick it to the man, so to speak. and also, as said, vocabulary is a whole separate beast from what was discussed here, sound shifts.
Here's some random predictions I have for my native language, Swedish: A lot of Swedish dialects merge /ɵ/ with /œ/ before /r/. Younger speakers of those dialects merge those in other positions as well, which I could see spreading to other dialects because of how unstable /ɵ/ probably is. A new vowel phoneme, /aː/, occurs in slang (tja /ɕaː/), swearwords (fan /faːn/) and loanwords (masala /masaːla/). It's sometimes used instead of /ɑː/ in loanwords in a similar way to how speakers of American English replace stressed /æ/ in loanwords with /ɑ/ to sound more foreign (American English /vjetnæm/ becomes /vjetnɑm/, Swedish /masɑːla~masaːla/). Currently there are few situations where it can't be replaced with /ɑː/, but I could see it becoming more and more mandatory. Aspirated plosives are consistently spirantised, so I could see the future American sound shift happening in future Swedish, especially with the influence English has on Swedish. Pitch accent is currently getting leveled due to influence from immigrant languages. I'm pretty confident that southern dialects will start pronouncing a trilled /r/ instead of a uvular one, as I've noticed most younger people in Scania and even most people in general where I live doing that. I've noticed myself and others merging their retroflex consonants other than /ʈ/ and /ʂ/ with their alveolars. This might be because I live in a region where a previous uvular /r/ has recently been replaced with a trill. /ʈ/ is usually an affricate at the end of words, and I could see it becoming an affricate in other positions as well. The /ʈʂ/ clusters would also get reinterpreted as an affricate. The merging of retroflex consonants with alveolars would phonemise the pre-rhotic allophones of vowels, which was already phonemic in my dialect. I could see /ɕ/ and /ʂ/ becoming reanalysed as allophones of eachother, since they appear in complementary distribution. Maybe also a /tɕ~tʂ/ complementary distribution corresponding to English /tʃ/, with /ɕ~ʂ/ corresponding to English /ʃ/. I think onset position /tʃ/ would become [tɕ] because that's how I pronounce "chicken tikka masala" while speaking Swedish. With this, "church" would be theoretically loaned into future Swedish as [tɕɚtʂ]. My guess on English /ʃ/ becoming /ɕ~ʂ/ in Swedish is based on how the word "brorsa" is sometimes spelled "brosha", on how "shots" is loaned into Swedish as /ɕɔts/ and on how I speak English. Some English loanwords will change from previous /ɕ ɧ/ to /tɕ~tʂ ɕ~ʂ/, and others will stay the same.
Funny enough my accent... As an Southern Appalachian, we will merge or shift /tʃ/ to /tɕ/ as I notice when speaking we shift so often between /ɕ/ and /ʃ/. So we will probably be the only accent to drop ʃ in our sound inventory or have just an allophone situation. We don't have a fully /ʃ and tʃ/ or one that is in the process of deleting if there are vowels in a V_C_V situation or L shows up to break things. Dark L to be exact.
I mean a "modern standard English" variant still can become a way for future English speakers with their dialects to understand one common tongue (or even displace the dialects that form within the English-speaking community). For example, when I looked into Chinese history and they also had many dialects (including in the north to my surprise). Then throughout the 20th century thanks to Standard Chinese (a mix of Mandarin dialects) their language became more unified. edit: OFC the south still has its many regional languages/dialects? like Hokkien, Cantonese, Wu, etc...
Ooh, at 2:08 you make the point that AmE and BrE will diverge to the point of mutual unintelligibility, but the spellings probably won't be updated. So this means that you'll possibly end up with a situation where the two languages are mutually unintelligible in speech, but mutually intelligible in writing. Kinda how it's easier for Afrikaans and Dutch speakers to understand each other's written forms than the spoken forms. (Also, thinking about it, the same may apply to Contemporary English vs. Early Modern/Middle English. Like how knight would've been something like /kniçt/ rather than /nɑĭt/ (idk if that's correct, I suck at writing IPA for English vowels)) eg. in Dutch and Afrikaans there are differences in pronunciation, especially in long vowels and diphthongs, which are not reflected in spelling which makes the written languages more mutually comprehensible. See Dutch /f, v, ʋ/ → Afrikaans /f, f, v/, where I believe Dutch /f, v/ are still spelled in Afrikaans despite both being pronounced /f/, and /ʋ/ is still spelled despite being pronounced /v/. One can compare spelling diffs. to pronunciation diffs: (Do note that → /V:.CV/ and → /V.CV/, so eg is read more as "weete", so similar to rather than ) know: vs | /vɪə.tə/ vs /ʋeːt/ catch: vs | /faŋ/ vs /vɑ.ŋə/ brush/sweep: vs | /fɪə/ vs /veː.ɣə/ (Afrikaans devoiced /ɣ/ → /x/, and deletes intervocalic /x/, leading to oog/oë, boog/boë, rather than expected oog/oge, boog/boge, so an Afrikaans person could recognise as similar to *_veën_) cattle/livestock (coll.): vs | /fɪə/ vs /veː/ Though, even in writing, Dutch and Afrikaans aren't completely mutually intelligible anymore (but it doesn't take much practice for one to understand the other, though rapid speech can be tough without more practice). I'd say that when I first read a Dutch book (maybe age ten or twelve, with no previous experience) I caught perhaps 50% (much more than I can do with German for example, even after some practice), and after just a few months of practice it shot up to ~80%, even though reading Dutch was still slower and more mentally taxing than reading Afrikaans - learning how er, zij, and het are used in Dutch helped a lot. I am told, however, that the Dutch understand Afrikaans easier than the other way round, cause we've simplified a bunch of grammar. (That is, until we start speaking of _baaidjies_ or _kieries_ or _abba_ or _donga_ or _gogga_, cause we've borrowed some from Malay and Khoisan and Bantu languages) Also, elision can get extreme in rapid (or tired) speech, I myself have noticed /ek əs ni mux ni/ *"I is not tired not" → * [æk.si mu.xi] or even → *
i think we can also predict the destruction of the "on-line" in american english. i already see this in myself, where my dad pronounces the word as [än] but my mother from jersey says [ɔn]. because of the AAVE influence in my family as well i usually say [ɔn] but occasionally i'll say [än]. with AAVE becoming more influential i could see [ɔn] becoming the more widespread pronunciation in the urban north.
As much as i love these videos, i find them a bit impenetrable. I would like to learn enough to understand and predict the future of my own canadian english, but im unsure of where to start.
I would say it would lead to fixing is worth it. Due to if got countless vowel shifts or in the bad situation where my accent doesn't really follow the same vowel rules. It makes half of all vowels per sentence don't correspond or the irregular form is preferable due to serious elision shows up everywhere. Though would change words like " Everywhere to fix the "ver" party into VR in its spelling. Depending on the vowels here. It switches very often where front vowels e, ɛ, i, ɪ are gaining their rounded versions, while unrounded versions occur with the back vowels due to how back consonants influence the sounds harshly. K, T, D, F, B, P, and the voiceless th are basically about to go under a consonant shift and vowel shift. So you can have a word like Pine vs. Piney having a case of ablaut where "Pine " here said with ɐj ( with nasal ), but that extra /i/ in Piney turns into /ɤy/ in that vowel space. Due to a more closed mouth position when making /i~ɨ/.As more than half of the consonants will turn fricatives or affricates. For labial sounds or front ones, that will be the case. I notice that our v has a bad tendency to round vowels.
Maybe a good idea will be a video about Amharic language? Because you recordes videos about two important semitic languages: Hebrew and Arabic, so you could now record the video about Amharic.
Is this like standard American English because I’d argue my dialect the Worcester Massachusetts accent is a lot more different than standard American English. For example we tend to break of the ending nasal sounds of words and add it to the front of the next word when the next word starts with a vowel, making sentences sounding like ca ni getta can a coke (can I get can of coke). And we also have strong intrusive r like pronouncing sods as soder, or idea as idear. We also have a pretty clear T stop, k stop, and p stop shift to glottal stop at the end of words and sometimes in the middle of words, making coke sound like Co’ (‘ being a glottal stop) and Cat sound like Cae’. We also tend to nasalize words that end in nasals and just don’t pronounce the final nasal consonant we nasalize the vowel before it like Can sounds more like Cá (á being a nasalized a) and Can’t being pronounce Cá’. We also tend to make a lot of words like of, to, and a just become schwa. And finally the obvious one we have a non rhotic accent so we just don’t pronounce R’s at the end of words and it often leads to us lengthening the vowels within those words make ran into ráa (a pronounced ae). We also tend to make some random words that start with R we fully pronounce the vowels almost like in Rain instead of being one syllable we tend to say Ra-in, and ran would be re an (pronounced ray-an even though there isn’t an e in it idk why). But anyway that’s just some of the stuff I can think of in my Accent.
As a Southern Appalachian. That's more or less a similar situation, Soda stays as soda, but our labial sounds have been shifting into fricatives, our V has a bad tendency to round front vowels. Cat it typically in the process of losing voicing on final d, and often confusing it with glottalization. We typically make all words with a final M or N into nasal, which is noticeable in words like Doom, Whom, Comb when not pluralized. In the process of redeveloping long vs. short due to the fricatives and dropping of dental sounds in coda positions or being like French where they are inert. Where to form a C_V order for all words, the difference between Hard attack vs. Heart attack is confusing. Though unintentionally add schwa to words like " ran " to avoid losing the N. T/D basically only work on voicing with vowels, B/P distinct, though our avlealor consonants are about to just drop affricate's into fricatives, so words with GE/DGE/J and CH/TCH aren't discerned from ʃ/ʒ or very poorly. The Dark L will be the only L, while light l will be turned into a patched up tapped R, as COOL VS. COOLER get confused and turn L into R. Lake and Rake are discerned, K is just broken in the process of becoming velar or uvular. So K = /kx~x~χ/ If we ever had a reform, we would end up with the most reformed writing due to vowels are multiplying.
I think linguistic differentiation results from climate differences, isolation, and war. So I don't think it's entirely possible to predict future language drift. Wars sometimes are entirely unexpected. Though, because of much reduced isolation thanks to internet and climate control thanks to heating and air conditioning we can expect accents and languages to converge further. Mandarin will wind up replacing all the dialects except perhaps Cantonese and Cantonese related dialects, for example. The North South accent divergence in USA was very significant 50 years ago when I was a child, and now is basically non-existent. The transatlantic accent differences are also converging. I don't however note such convergence with English as spoken in India and have not heard a Jamaican accent in 40 years so that would be interesting to hear.
I am a younger male living in canada and I find myself pronouncing /g/ either like /ɣ/ or /ɰ/ (not sure which but I think it might be the former) in certain positions
In the Southern USA, Specifically Appalachia, we are in a similar case, but /g/ is closer /ɣ/ and generally make words throatier. Though we are about to turn /k/ into /kx/ ~ /x/ ~ /χ ~χʌ/. Maybe lose our light l's in favor of a tapped R, dental first syllables being alright.... Here due to the R, being in the back of the mouth, it is turning either tapped or going to switch into ʁ, once the middle R, turning into a back R. While having an R depending on the consonant before it due to a high stress in first syllables here. Words like green use that ɣ here.
At 9:05 you said "that" like British with their intonation. At 8:52 your "common" has the added hard h after the c. It really creeps into the American English. Same with words "possible" and similar (po, co) beginnings. Sounds like p.h.o.s.i.b.l, and that h is like the French r or the Dutch g.
My Predictions for my dialect of English, Received Pronunciation: /ð/ is already often pronounced as [d̪] word-initially and [v] elsewhere, so I think /ð/ will merge with [d] and [v] in these positions and /θ/ will merge with /f/ in all positions The Post-Alveolar fricatives and affricates become Alveolo-Palatal /l/ vocalisation and /t/ glottalisation will become standard, but then [ʔ] and intervocalic [ɫ] could also be lost, meaning a words like butter and colour would be pronounced [bɐə] and [kɐʊə]. Then [ə] is likely to be dropped and compensatorily lengthen the preceding vowel giving [bɐː] and [kɐːʊ] Vowels will probably be nasalised when followed by /n/ word finally, removing the nasal consonant [pn̩] and [kn̩] will become [ʔm̩] and [ʔŋ̩] /r/ will become [ʋ] or perhaps [ɹ̠ᶹ] /h/ will be lost The voicing distinction between /p/ /t/ /k/ /t͡ɕ/ and /b/ /d/ /g/ /d͡ʑ/ could be lost, creating a pure aspiration distinction Triphthongs and some diphthongs are already reducing, so: [ɑɪə] > [ɑː] [aʊə] [aʊ] > [aː] [əʊə] [əʊ] > [ɜː] [eɪə] [eɪ] > [ɛː] [ɔɪə] [ɔɪ] > [ɔː] I think a major vowel shift is likely to happen, and I think it's already starting. This is my general idea: [ɪ] > [ɘ] [ɒ] > [o] [ʌ] > [ɐ] [iː] > [ei] [ɛː] > [æː] [ɑː] > [ɐː] [ɔː] > [uː] [uː] > [yː]
Which region are you South Eastern? As we will retain /h/ well on the edge of the south and Southern Appalachia. Though we will collapse the p, b, f into fricatives. I remember, just today in the store, heard the almost deletion of /dʒ/... D is going to be removed, we will just lose t/d for the voiced vs. unvoiced, but it does have a tendency to switch to /ȶɕ/ or at least retroflex with more use of the teeth. While in day to day, t/d are reducing in coda positions, or being treated as one of the same sound in coda positions. For basic words like "it" or heart/hard, it has a hard time telling the difference if there are vowels after it. The nasal vowel impact will happen. Our K is basically soft and may either shift into cʰ and its variants or go full throaty and just shift with /x~kx~χ ( just softer ) / Leading to an ich-laut system. /g/ will turn into /ɣ/ in the presence of a dark L or middle R, our light l's may just do what Portuguese vs. Spanish did, shift into tapped r. We are in the process of shifting our whole vowel system If the word has a final /i~ɨ/ and the diphthong in question is /ɐj/, then will shift front and mutate into /øy/ As Pine, Piney, Pie DON'T USE THE SAME VOWELS here at all. We do loan words from Spanish leading to having retained /ä + ɑ/ ( due to enviromental conditions. An here has mutated into from /ən/, but if /ɛ, e/ show up, the indefinite article turns into /eøn/, but leads the /ɛ/ to switch to a back vowel /ʌ/. We switching into a Deutsch system? As vowels in these situations are going from Front to back, but the closed mouth position of "an" shifted into fronting that monster. When it comes to vowel correspondence vs. RP speakers. Heed = y: Vowel formant: 1803 perfectly on /y/'s top 2120 vs. 317, in the process of devoicing, but pitch wise drops. One stop from mixing heat and heed. A word with " /i/"? Yet not even the case. Beat = yʏ vowel formant: 1789, the b is becoming a fricative Hid = e: as our vowel "Supposed to be a "[ɪ], but in reality is closer to that. Bit = œ (Due to a Fricative is messing up B's dramatically ) Hate =ø̞e vowel formant 1400, but a diphthong Bait = ɛy, our t's are weak. There is a noticeable vowel drift, due to the influence of B/P not acting normal. These are the supposed " e " Had = æ: Bat = æ̈ So our front vowels are basically fucked over. Hot =/= Bought truncation is noticeable. We'll end up with 26, the round vs. unrounded, almost like Danish.
What can explain me seeing the "gh" at the end of "enough" and "tough" being pronounced as "θ" instaid of "f"? Like maybe the easier to pronounce, but in the way where it's easier to read? Kind of like making gh the same sound as th because they generally sound the same and look basically the same?
If people start living much longer (scientists say we could live up to 20,000 years if aging was ever cured), would linguistic change be slowed down, or would people only be able to understand those who were born close to when they were?
I feel like to do this I gotta start walking around just recording everything I or my friends say, So I can better notice little mistakes or peculiarities.
That's different, since Indonesian didn't evolve from Arabic. Since /p/ is native in Indonesian and /f/ isn't, that's just Indonesian speakers making the Arabic loanword easier to pronounce for them
@@watchyourlanguage3870 what is interesting tho is that many people start to pronounce those used-to-be /f/ as /f/ again, just very inconsistently as they sometimes pronounce what originally /p/ as /f/
14:55 interesting.Аbout a month ago I started pronouncing the Russian word "Hoнсенс" (nonsens) as "Нонценц" (nontsents).Same applies to "Санжар - Санджар" (Sanzhar - Sanjar), "ганзолька - гандзолька" (ganzol'ka - gandzol'ka), "Аншлаг - антшлаг" (anshlag - anchlag).I was curious about how this phenomenon is called and now I know.
I feel like the "dr/tr to jr/chr" shift would be more likely to happen than the "dVr/tVr to jVr/chVr" shift. Sorry for the lack of IPA, typing IPA symbols on the phone is a hassle.
@@đœwæþ Good god that accent locally here is a good way to be talked down around here or people just avoid talking with you. As a south easterner. Valley girl accent is annoying as it has poor grammar and repeats too many words, and locally here. We basically have the habit of turning front unrounded vowels into rounded front vowels due to not pronouncing all of the letters in a closed mouth position. Often using a fricative for everything.
I don't know if I'm describing it well, but to me at least, "posh" is more old money and "bougie" is more new money. So they're not perfectly synonymous to me
Elderly men from the countryside being the slowest to progress sounded unlikely to me at first but then I thought about how my Grandpa talked and realized that pronouncing "washed" as "warshed" is definitely an example
In the case of Portuguese, it's rapidly approaching English and Spanish. Regarding Spanish, with the growth of the Brazilian spoken variety, it is closer to Spanish. And regarding Portuguese with English words or words derived from English, there are: Internet Mouse Delete / deletar Wi-fi Headset Site Online Offline Shampoo Cotonete (coton net) Hamburguer Cream cheese Bacon Cupcake Diet Fast food Milk shake Katchup Picles (pickles) Waffle Boxe (box) Baseball Basquete (basketball) Vôlei (volleyball) Surf / surfar (surf / surfing) Jeans Short (shorts) Tênis (tennis) Blazer Hobby Videogame Trailer Spoiler Best seller Táxi (taxi) Pickup (pickup truck) Freezer Frigobar Cooler Grill (Grilling Machine) Design Laser Botox And much more...
Very enjoyable video, also helps to know some general trends in sound changes for conlangs 13:22 While others have brought up other examples, to me Korean comes to mind as a language that doesn't assimilate /n/ before velars, eg. 인간 [in.gan] "human being", 친구 [tɕin.gu] "friend", 안경 [an.gjʌŋ] "glasses"...
The same in Polish -- in some regional varieties "Lenka" (diminutive female name from "Lena") and "lęka" ("it is affraid") are homofones /lɛŋka/, but in others (including official), "Lenka" is /lɛnka/ with unassimilated /n/.
"don't even attempt future vocabulary, it will get you nowhere" As in, it's impossible to predict future vocabulary and therefore it's a futile process? That feels like a reductive point of view to me, especially if the whole point is to have fun constructing a language based on a language you're innately familiar with. Is predicting phonology and grammar any more possible to predict? Maybe, but i reckon it's not actually that much. All you can reasonably do is extrapolate from current and historical sound and grammar changes, and that only goes so far. Similarly, you can only predict vocabulary changes based on trends in the past or processes ongoing in the present, even if what you can predict is a more limited than phonology and grammar. I do see your point in that it's probably not as fun, but it feels kind of redactive to say that it's a futile activity. Also, it's definitely possible (although i do agree that it's improbable) for British and American to merge. The trend over time is that people are more attached to the internet as time goes on, and the more on-the-internet you are, the easier it is to speak with people from far-away places. I assume that that trend will eventually stop because i don't think most humans want to end up like the people in Wall-E, but hey, maybe that's the dystopia we're headed towards. Another thing you have to consider is how the perception of gender, race, and the urban/rural divide is changing in American society, although that requires the prediction of America's political future, which is very difficult to do. Definitely an interesting thought experiment though: how will American politics affect American society, and how will that different society affect the future American language? how will those effects change continuously over time?
If you want to make a conlang of Future American and therefore have new vocabulary, that's perfectly fine, and not futile, but that was never my goal. For my own goal of trying to predict the likely trajectory of American English, predicting vocab is, in fact, futile
One language that surprisingly doesn't have nk, ng → ŋk, ŋg assimilation is Russian. Which is one of the reasons why the cyrillization of Chinese uses -н for final -ng and -нь for final -n.
@@luckyave777 Accent vs dialect isn’t really different, “accent” is just a narrower term for “dialect” that only involves pronunciation and may occasionally have a connotation of non-standardness. But yes, that’s how languages develop away from each other
I hate when people say "Gen Alpha is cooked" because they speak a "bad" version of english. It is not bad english that's how English is suppose to evolve.
@ryanpmcguire 1. You dont understand how language works 2. the internet age exposes us to more people than we could have ever previously thought possibly, so statistically youre more likely to encounter people who might have lower literacy skills as opposed to watching man on the street interviews on tv
@@ryanpmcguire I hate when people say that that era of English is better than this era because at the end of the day language is evolving and back then they think the language they spoke back then was inferior to middle english or something like that
I would say Gen Z forgot how to umlaut as. I know one co-worker that says "GasLighted" not "Gaslit" As that's disgusting. Seriously, you are a native speaker and I would say... The quality degradation has declined from 2020 vs now. Where I constantly find typos in basic sections. I get short-handing everything, but it is sad that non-natives are either getting better than natives or natives just can't read or write anymore. Only focus on all syllables, instead of just the first only.
@@MaoRatto I can see a reason for using ''gaslighted'' instead of ''gaslit'' seeing how the ''light'' in ''gaslight'' comes from the noun light and not the verb light, so ''gaslit'' is treating the ''light'' part as if it came from the verb and not the noun. Though I always found ''gaslit'' to be more intuitive to me imo. Also ''gaslighted'' is already an adjective meaning illuminated by a gas light.
How does rhythm and cadence feature into linguistic predictions? English since Middle English has a pretty distinctive iambic rhythm that shares some features with other Germanic languages (e.g. stress timing) but is certainly pretty far from the mean (compare Old English, which is a much more "typical" sounding Germanic language). How might this aspect of "Future American" change, especially with influence from Spanish, a syllable-timed language?
@@tankermottind For your first question, the isochrony of a language mostly changes as a result of other features changing. For example, in French: Latin was probably to some extent mora-timed, due to having both vowel length and consonant gemination distinction. But then it would’ve become stress-timed, as the gemination left and French started reducing its vowels, many of which would later drop off entirely, making French now syllable-timed (except not exactly, bc there are still some reduced syllables that get said, like “que”). As far as Future American adopting Spanish syllable-timing, I mean, maybe, but English has reduced vowels that are easier to say short, so I wouldn’t bet on it, unless those vowels either stop being reduced or disappear altogether (neither of which is likely)
@@watchyourlanguage3870 It's not just that though, but also the way stress is allocated within words and the way words "naturally" fit together--like compare Beowulf to The Canterbury Tales. Both feature stress-timed languages, but Chaucer's Middle English has a very familiar rhythm to Modern English speakers, while Beowulf's Old English does not.
Not to mention, regarding intelligability... have you ever heard the way East Germans talk? It's intelligable, sure, but they do have a very distinct dialect after just 40 years of relative isolation. Or take Low German and Swiss German. Both are considered German, but they are so far apart, they might aswell be different languages.
It's weird how in about 4000 years English could be a long lost common ancestor to hundreds of complex and diverse languages. Makes you think that maybe PIE was just a small language that was apart of a much bigger family.
@@MrPillowStudios IT probably was
a part =/= apart
Usually typos like this don't matter much, but their meanings are complete opposites of each other. If something is a part of something else, they are connected; if something is apart of something else they are separate.
I mean yeah. We have evidence of new languages and language families constantly flaking off of PIE since the very beginning. (such as Hittite) The only reason we can't go further back and trace more languages is that we run up to the limit of recorded history.
If an entire language family dies out before any decendants have had a chance to be written down, we have no way of tracing the original language even indirectly.
English is spoken in so many places it will 100% become a whole tree. I mean Indian English is already not even mutually intelligible with more standard English dialects
Reading þis makes me wonder what the þree stages of English (Old, Middle, and Modern) will be called in future English as well as what future English will call itself. I would surmise þat ‘twould call itself “post-modern” English or someþing of þat sort.
Sound shifts also influence grammar. Two well known examples are Latin and Japanese. In Latin, the /o/ in the o-stem nominative and accusative singular became raised to /u/, which led to the u-stem declension assimilating to the more common o-stem class in Proto-Romance. On the other hand, Japanese had a native [p] shift to [φ → h] and then merge with [w] in the middle of a word but ultimately lost [w] outside of [wa] so that the original p-row verbs are now reflected as [wa e i u o].
That'll 100% happen for my region as grammatically we kind of forced to avoid the " He's " contract due to B here is one step from W/V, V here already has a bad habit of rounding high vowels. Every consonant that can mutate a vowel, will mutate it in some way. Our native F is on a course to slamming into /ɸ/, same with our P wanting to also be /φ/ this a mistake I make when speaking in Spanish for restaurants and flea markets where we make the mistake of /φ/, but /β/ is still made. Mostly due to trading in similar areas and eating in areas of both. The Spanish influence here maybe responsible for over-articulating p into φ as in market situations. That does happen to match similar sounds. I do predict our B will switch β then redo the cycle of V/W. Though I noticed our vowels are mutating dramatically and much less like their Spanish counterparts, but borderline German and Swedish. As we are already speaking with a more closed mouth sound often leading water being with a rhotic vowel in front, wash being worsh/warsh. So we'll speak with more vowels, though T and D OFTEN BREAK.
We'll probably have irregular plurals and genitives for all coda t's and d's, and go through a vowel shift that was triggered as T and D couldn't be asked to articulate in final and middle positions.
@@MaoRatto where are you? By the way, speaking of over-articulation, I can see a future where Hindustani potentially shifts from having most of its breathy voiced series immediately like that. This is not altogether implausible, breathy voiced and voiceless consonants are commonly analyzed as having a similar voice onset time and so it is typologically rare for a language to have both and have held them for the millennia from Proto-Indo-European to Hindustani. In fact, over-articulation is known to cause aspirated stops to shift to (normally) unaspirated fricatives, and a shift from /pʰ/ to /f/ is already happening in native Indian words in Hindustani and other Indian languages with the stop as it has happened in Greek. And in Greek, it happened at all places of articulation, so once the labial column shifts, it may be difficult to avoid Hindustani and other Indian languages becoming pseudo-Castilian.
@@alsatusmd1A13 South Eastern more or less the border of Appalachia. North Carolinians typically come to our state often.... Which have similar features, but not as agressive with the removal of T and D. Though raise the pitch of their vowels in a similar way.
I learned about the whole p -> h/-w shift in Japanese not too long ago and it cleared a lot of things for me. は (topic marker) is a remnant of that which hasn’t changed in spelling, possibly due to the fact it can’t be used at the start of the sentence anyway and is technically akin to intervocalic voicing bc of [topic] + は + [clause]. Similarly, へ (particle) is [e], likely as pe -> we -> e (the w row only has [wa] as all the other w- syllables merged with the vowels).
@@tideghost In Japanese, it never had a massive issue with the writing vs. spoken form in that regard. Due to the shift, wasn't too dramatic for other words.
In Bengali, I've pronounced some words differently on accident. For example:
"Taratari" (meaning quick or fast) - To "Tatari" due to fast pronunciation.
"Jono" (meaning for) - To "Juno"
"Ha" (meaning yes (this word is also nasalized)) - To "Ho" (also nasalized)
All of those follow common change patterns! Especially the last one, many nasal vowels have moved from A to O over history, so you're likely onto something!
@@watchyourlanguage3870 Some dialects of Bengali already use "Ho" instead of "Ha". People in smaller towns or villages tend to use "Ho".
@@coordinateplanefun Maybe relevant - in Marathi (my mother tongue) the word was yes is "ho".
in Azerbaijani, you say "hə" [hæ:] to say yes. Last summer, suddenly, my brother and I started saying it as [æ:], we dropped that h.
@@bletwort2920 "ha" or "ho" most likely originate from Sanskrit, which is most likely why multiple languages in Southern Asia share the same word.
"Urban teenage girls are at the top of the hierarchy and the rural elderly men are at the bottom"
"This is why there is a P sound in "hamster."
There is WHAT?
hampster
Hampter
Hampter
hampster
Hampter
Actually, the use of "mother", "daughter", and "sister" to describe languages happens to arise from the word for "language" in German being a feminine noun.
"Lengua" (Language) is also a feminine noun in spanish
@@cedriko1662yes because in Latin "lingua" was feminine
I can see word final plosive devoicing being a fully systematic thing for English - especially in the UK where i live since i already notice it pretty often and it'd make sense considering German also already has this feature
I've noticed it too, albeit in Irish-English. It's funny: I don't recall hearing it at all about a decade ago, but I'm hearing it more and more.
@@dr.seesaw8894 it's probably that there were always dialects or accents in which this occured. The plosive devoicing at the end words began at least at the end of the Old High German period. So I also think it is in many Germanic dialects a feature. In Icelandic voiced ð at the end is devoiced to þ. And also g at the end is similar to a soft German h or ch as in ach-Laut. And so on.
@@talideon My dialect is a relative of Irish, due to descedants in the Appalachian mountains. It does occur with anything postalveolar. Though we have gotten throatier and one step away from not being English in terms of vowels.
I triple double dare you to make future Dutch video.
Gone, reduced to funny English
I am working on one!
Dutch will die out in 50 years because replaced by English.
So, sextuple?
I so badly want to understand this video but without knowing the phonetic alphabet I basically can’t.
you get used to it pretty fast if you see it enough ( and study it a little )
You can find videos on here of people explaining it, it's really not that hard
Polymathy and Language Jones have done videos explaining the IPA in a way that's easy to understand. I suggest you check them out. They also both have really good linguistic content in general
It's really not rocket science. I was able to learn it completely on my own just through Wikipedia back in the day.
In fact, I have a video about it
Not sure if someone else has already commented this, but for your example of using certain British words for convenience, I have a similar but opposite situation! I instead use "snobby" quite a bit, which I believe is a word more commonly used by Americans 😂
On the West coast we'll tend to use "bougie" instead
That's interesting! I'm American myself (and fairly representative of a small, obscure rural dialect that I'm a bit concerned is gonna go undocumented and vanish), and I've noticed that due to influence from some of my family (who have my dialect but read a lot of fantasy that uses more archaic English features and/or UK dialectical features, lots of 19th century American and British books, and modern books from the UK), influence from art, and influence from my partner (who grew up with one parent speaking a California Bay Area dialect of English and the other speaking a Scottish dialect), I have a few features of British dialects thrown into my speech and writing. I often default to UK spellings on things that have an OU over there where there's just an O over here (so I write colour, armour, that kind of thing for the most part, with some exceptions. I write harbour for things like "Harbouring a grudge," but "Harbor" for "Ships dock at the harbor."). I also say top up instead of top off, and say "Pants" and "Trousers" about evenly (if I had to guess which word applies when, trousers are nicer clothes like slacks or dressy stuff made of wool and whatnot, while pants is generic. So I have my green trousers, which are wool and get pressed between washes, and my green pants, which are cotton and make me look like I'm on BSG). If my partner is talking about getting crisps vs getting chips, I'll usually call both things chips (both the crunchy little slices in a bag that I call chips and they call crisps, and the soft little sticks I usually call fries that they call chips. I struggle to pronounce the word crisps, which is probably why I only half follow their lead in conversation there). But if I'm not around them, those revert back to being chips and fries (except when discussing fish and chips). Similarly, I call it soccer until I'm speaking with my partner, at which point it becomes football. I exclusively say "Autumn" and get confused for a minute when I see it called "Fall" (this literally just happened to me, I was just checking the schedule for my college classes, went to select the "Fall term," and had a split second where I actually wondered what the hell was falling over and where "Autumn term" went lmao). I find it fun to see which little words get swapped between dialects, because they're often so seemingly random!
@@horseenthusiast9903 Great examples haha! Thank you for the fun read 😋🙏🏻
I'm American I've never said snobby
@@marafty3776 Ah good to know and thanks for saying! :) I'm Northern Irish myself, but I've grown up with American media all my life. I remember hearing the word on various shows centered in the 2000's, although that may just have to do with the timeframe? Or maybe what state you're in? I'm really fascinated with stuff like that! ^^ 😋
5:40 this shift of which dialect is most prestigious has a good example in british english: until the 1960s, Received Pronounciation had the most prestige, and it was very much an upper class accent. for various reasons, it fell out of favour since then, and got replaced by Standard Southern British, a middle class accent. If you look at the royal family, Elizabeth and Charles were/are RP speakers, but William and Harry speak SSB.
And Prince George's kids are gonna sound like Roadmen.
This is about Indian languages which may not be relevant to European languages but I'd like to share what I know.
At some stage in the development of Indo-Aryan languages all consonant clusters of Sanskrit were assimilation into doubled consonants. Later the doubled consonant lost its gemination and the preceding vowel lengthened.
Interestingly if one of the consonants in the cluster is a fricative (i.e. sibilant) it made the other consonant in the cluster to become aspirated.
Examples
Sanskrit > Hindi
akshi > akkhi > ākh
hasta > hattha > hāth
mushti > mutthi
mastaka > mattha(g)a > māthā
kaksha > kakkha > kākh
ashta > attha > āth
If there was no fricative then the same process happened but without adding aspiration.
sapta > satta > sāt
sarpa > sāp
danta > dãt
mitra > mīt
Intervocal and perhaps postvocalic consonants were lost altogether.
sūkara > sūar
shata > sada > sau
Note that Hindi kept reborrowing words from Sanskrit as Sanskrit was the language of religion and science. Some of these words borrowed centuries ago are semi-learned. In these words while the consonants were retained the consonant cluster was broken.
varsha > baras
karma > karam (the inherited word is kām)
Modern Hindi also borrows words from Sanskrit but this time retains the structure.
really random question but does sūkara/sūar mean sugar?
@@SpaghettiDog86. no, sugar is sarkarā, sūkara is pig, cognate with swine.
@@SpaghettiDog86.It means "pig"
@@SpaghettiDog86. Shakkar = Sugar, Suar = Pig
@@arnavranka4510 Cognate with English 'sow'?
I think ð will become an allophone of d in unstressed syllables in Swedish. I’ve noticed many young women (myself included) occasionally pronounce -ade (past tense suffix) as -að, for instance.
That's not surprising to me as Swedish to me sounds like my mother tongue at times. Except the many front vowels, but then again locally our front vowels occur due to 1. The closed mouth posture, 2. Ablaut as -an as our indefinite article has a habit of turning into /eøn/ To make words with front vowels like electric, much easier to hear/say.... Though the fate of /θ/ I notice I turn it into an F or ɸ. I notice that our labial sounds will shift into fricative versions, but notice we are developing rounded front vowels due to fricatives, but V here does sometimes cause some of our sounds to round the front sound.
• 7:18 I've noticed a similar thing happen in Polish: the 3rd person singular present of "to be" - "jest" often loses its final t, and is pronounced as /jɛs/.
• I also see myself drop the g in the anlaut of interrogative "gdzie" - "where".
• The sound of the letter "ł" (/w/) is also sometimes dropped or at least gets turned into a semivowel - for example "wołałem" - "I was calling (yelling) - /voa.ɛːm/.
• A lot of children in Poland go to a speech therapist beacuse they notoriously can't pronounce ʂ and tʂ, thought some started calling it a "variant of speech" (???). A lot of these children then grow up and still keep on pronouncing them as /s/ and /ts/.
• Though the next thing may be dialectal, I often hear people say /χ/ instead of /x/, usually before vowels.
Too slow, Bulgarian is already 3 steps ahead and contracted the same 3rd person singular present to just "e"/ɛ/ many centruries ago
hi im trying to learn polish :) i thought i'd noticed the ł not quite deleting, but losing its velar character and becoming [β̞] intervocalically. also i'm curious why you transcribed a long ɛ when i thought that usually it would be the stressed, penultimate vowel to be lengthened.
also, how come you didnt mention denasalization of word final /w̃/? i think it's the most common one of them all. cheers :D
Similar to it. The sounds for my English often confuse /f/ and /θ/. Due to well, the frequencies when speaking overlap TOO MUCH, with another allophone of /f/ being /ɸ/ often showing up "fife, free, flea/flee, and over time will replace /f/ ". Same with B turning slowly into /β/ like in any situation with BR unlike deleting or metathesis. It typically shows up with R. P here does turn into /φ/ yet retaining aspiration due to using a Fortis/Lenis system, but does come at the cost of consonants often reducing in half of the words. T/D turn into glottals sometimes in middle and final positions, final vowels turn long if they have a glide in their final position. I remember being on the phone to get my spectrum interner fixed, and he couldn't tell I was saying " N or M " due to the vowel basically does nasalize into it. I do know that the city below me does nasalize, while here it is partially, but the vowels do slowly turn unround vs. rounded. Basic words like you; which should be /ju/, but we already had sounds like /ʏ/ existing in our vowels, but if a standard English /u/ shows up, normally here it has a tendency to be a switch of /ɪʉ/ if there was a /j/ historically, but shifting to a softer, but often the vowel itself corresponds to /ø/ so originally /u/, may have turned originally into /y/, but then lowered. Our K has been basically collapsing into /kx~x~χ/ depending on the context, Typically if it is V_C_V then yes it turns into /kx~x/, with a vowel raise. The "southern drawl " is strong in my accent, but often leading to T dropping where P, F, K exists. The stress has historically always stayed on first syllables, so most mid-western may shift it around. Though notice that basically unlike most accents, we kind of took 20-ish vowels and jumped above often leading to some round vs. unrounding due to dark L, weakening of T/D, R starting to geminate, light L turning into tapped r in a lot of words like " Cool " vs. " Cooler ". If /w/ breaks, well it turns into /ɯ/ like a simple expression like "Have a good one " turning into Have a good'/ɯ:n/. In fast conversations, T either if there aren't any vowels turning into almost stød, or /d/ if there are vowels. The mouth position has always been more closed. Some verbs like "have been" switch in the pronunciation to "œ/ hav βœ(m~n) or deleting the vowel entirely." The spoken form here has always been sounding like a stream of hiccoughs due to shoving most back consonants in the back or the T/D situation.
A step closer to Czech "on je" :)
Probably pronounced the same way as our Bulgarian friend mentions
I pronounce /ˈvjɛ.d͡zɔw̃/ as
[ˈvjɔm] and /ˈzjɛ.d͡zɔw̃/ as [ˈzjɔm] etc. I think it's emitting a part of the word stem I would assume. I also pronounce który and kto as chtóry and chto. I also noticed that I pronounce words like dzisiaj and wczoraj as dzisiej and czorej.
I’m interested in the possible effects of virtual assistants (Alexa, Siri) and chat bots (chatGPT, copilot) on actually slowing down language shift given their largely fixed nature. Ex: you have to speak carefully for Alexa to understand you and vice-versa Alexa’s voice is largely fixed in speaking style.
The main audience for human language will always be humans. I think the robots will adapt to us way more than we'll adapt to them.
I don’t think there will be a major effect, if any at all. I have never used virtual assistants and do not know anyone that actually uses them often.
We're moving quick through the following stages:
- there are no machines that can understand human speech;
- robots understand us if we speak very slowly and use a controlled vocabulary;
- robots usually understand us unless we speak too quickly (we are here);
- robots understand clearly what everyone within microphone range is speaking all at the same time and can reply in any desired style
This may or may not matter, but one thing I think we can be confident of is that "having to speak carefully so the robot understands" won't be true for long.
I'm Punjabi and I can speak Urdu. One change I've noticed is that I don't pronounce /ɦ/, even in formal speech. Where the [ɦ] used to be, there's now a low tone, so if I say /ɦã/ 'yes', I pronounce it has [ã̀] with a low tone. This, I think, is because of Punjabi. Punjabi is the first Indo-Aryan language to become tonal, and Punjabi is the majority language in Pakistan. So it would make sense that under Punjabi influence Urdu would become tonal as well. This is fascinating because Hindi would not become tonal because it is the majority language in India so it would not be (heavily) influenced by Punjabi. Maybe Urdu and Hindi would diverge into separate languages.
One change that I didn't mention in the original comment is that sometimes, my breathy-voiced stops merge with voiced stops and give off a low tone. So, if I say /bʱagna/ 'to run', I actually say [bàgna]. This is similar to what happened in Punjabi. Coincidence? I think not.
@@Moses_Caesar_Augustus bruh
@@TheEpikalREKT what?
@@Moses_Caesar_Augustus I think he meant Urdu and Hindi ARE separate languages already.
@@tantuce If he's saying that he's wrong.
I suppose the most prominent sound changes we may find when we learn old and new languages are: ai>e, au>o, ke>che, ki>chi, dropping last short vowels. You may find nearly all of them in Latin, Arabic, Common Slavic and their descendants.
13:55 Progressive voicing assimilation is actually also found in Slavic languages, although less frequently. For example in certain sound combinations in Polish ("kwiat") and Czech ("tři"), and in eastern dialects of Czech.
i think it's because those sounds were originally sonorant-class (transparent to voicing due to being always voiced) before being fortitioned to fricatives, which allowed them to lose voicing in order to keep the cluster's voicing information intact.
as a speaker of southern british english, something i've started to notice which i personally haven't seen any mention of anywhere (if anyone knows of any, feel free to point me in the direction of any possible sources) is /h/ being "hardened" before /a/ and /ɑː/
i haven't noticed it in /aː/ or /ʌ/ (i'm pointing out /ʌ/, because at least in my speech, i have seven main vowel areas, with short, long, and diphthongised versions of each vowel, with /ʌ/ being the short equivalent to /ɑː/), nor in the diphthongs /aw/ or /ɑj/
before /a/ and /ɑː/, i'm hearing /h/ turning into [χ ~ ʀ̥], resulting in pronunciations such as [χaʔ ~ ʀ̥aʔ] for ‹hat›, or [χɑːʔ ~ ʀ̥ɑːʔ] for ‹heart›
i've not really paid attention to the demographics of the people who pronounce /ha/ and /hɑː/ like that, but i've noticed it happening maybe 50-75% of the time in myself (young and female, but from the countryside, though within 20 minutes of a large town, and half an hour of a city)
That's weird as locally as a speaker with a Southern Appalachian accent. It's /k/ turning into /kx~x~χ/ depending on the consonants like clank, Using /χ/ in that situation due to the dark L. Though it seems like we are gaining more vowels due to the symptom of over-rhoticism leading to our words either 1. Being more closed in the mouth or 2. Gemination unintentionally. Though most of our labial sounds are shifting into fricatives, the back consonants are also doing the same, but much less for the voiced /g/ though when in context to the r, yes it does switch. T/D typically turn into almost a stød system in the singular/non-genitive, but if we break w's, they turn often into /ɯ/. So future for us it wouldn't be too hard to understand southern british, but confused with h's being our k's. Due to a harsh stress in first syllables.
Yes, I notice this too a lot. Especially in American English, but recently I started noticing it also in the British.
The author of this video inserted that h at 9:02 or :05.
Often this is in words like consonant, constantly, possible etc.
It grinds my ears and I notice it constantly.
@@MaoRatto That's the same sound change scouse english underwent in the city of Liverpool, UK.
While linguistics is mostly just a side interest for me, this topic has a practical application to my field. I have worked in hazardous waste for decades and was hired into nuclear waste cleanup. Some of these wastes have half-lives of thousands of years (e.g. Pu-240 t1/2=6,560 year). The area I work sends drums wastes and grouted nuclear wastes to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, NM. Some effort has been put into predictive future languages to warn future humans to keep away from these wastes.
@@denisdooley1540 Oh cool, I’ve heard somewhat about this subject, that future humans might not understand what ☢️ or 🚫 means, or any modern words. Heard something about glowing cats, not sure if that’s a thing tho
@@watchyourlanguage3870 It would make for an interesting follow up video. I only know of it, I don't know a lot about it, but I went and found this from DOE. www.wipp.energy.gov/pdfs/How-Will-Future-Generations-Be-Warned.pdf
I do notice a few things about my speech, I am a late teen and not sure why I do it but-
I silence some vowels between two non voiced consonants. thing the u (schwa) in suspicious.
at the beginning of words like "its" I either pronounce the ih silent, or not at all, saying something like "ts interesting."
or, in the word aforementioned "interesting" I say it like "intresting"
some other speech things, I do notice in fast speech I roll the R, "I wouldn't have known" "i woulrr'n av known" and other cases where this applies.
this is common actually, among youth, you can notice the popular gen z streamers doing it, as a meme and kinda just on accident.
the silent vowel thing, when I speak to older people they think im mumbling. I am easily understood by younger people, I thought I was speaking fast but for those really reduced consonants, like schwa, and ih, i feel like are really easy to devoice.
lmk your thoughts on it
I probably do all of those to some extent as well (I'm 23), and I always pronounce interesting as "intresting". If we were gonna be somewhat ambitious with the predictions, maybe we could use the first example of "tsintresting" to predict that Future American will develop "s" as some sort of third-person copulative prefix on adjectives (meaning "it's", essentially). The /d/ > [r] shift is also possible. Great examples!
I also find myself saying «it's» as "ts" or /s/
@@pxolqopt3597 To me, its/it's use stress, but always glottalizing the t.
I'm interested in how Liþuanian will evolve in þ'coming centuries, given its snailpace rate of linguistic changes.
may it never changeee
This is a very good video. Some things that came to mind while watching: 13:14 I think an obvious example of a language which lacks [ŋ] as an allophone of /n/ before velar plosives is Russian. I speak Finnish near-natively, and the American "foot" vowel sounds very far from Finnish ö. I've recordeed myself pronouncing it (I speak American English natively), analyzed the formants, and I'd much rather transcribe it as [ɵ]. [ø] is simply too far front. Also, I think it odd that you find an affricate realization of English /t/ rare, as its usual pronunciation (for me, you, and many others) is already somewhat affricated. (I transcribe it [t͡s̆ʰ])
Yea I notice the affricate /t/ all the time in both myself and other speakers I think Dr Geoff Lindsey also predicted this will be a full sound shift as well in one of his videos for SSBE
My Polish grandmother also doesn't change n to ng before k and g! This leeds to words like 'punkt' sounding like she's beat boxing. Younger Poles do tho
I have analyzed for formants as well, and locally here. Œ, ø, including ö like between Swedish and German can occur. Words with -ment suffix often get said with the nasal œ with a start to tonal genesis or stød. As words with T shift into soft glottalization, but gains force with the word has a D. Often being throaty, and if the future is anything... We would end up in Danish situation with the most amount of vowels and pure instability. We never had stable sounds to begin with. T/D being able to glottalize in middle and final positions... Voiceless The gets mixed up with F due to having the same frequencies, The F itself is more closed in the frontal position or last syllable, Raising and falling being present in vowels, V having a habit of rounding vowels after it, B shifting into W or V, dark L being a reason to redo the umlaut system, Light L has a bad habit of turning into tapped r in V_C_V positions, nasalition and retaining Vowel + L in more words than most dialects... I believe as apart of the Eastern side of the USA, we will end up with a High vs Low German situation.
@@EvenRoyalsNeedToUrinate I believe it may be a common historical feature of Slavic languages.
I believe not only russian but all slavic languages dont have ŋ as an allophone on n
5:38 It seems like the tendency for language to move between high and low class could be modeled somehow by socioeconomic factors, though I haven't worked out what precisely. It seems like population density is a factor. In a high density population, job openings are scarce, so the tendency is for the lower class to imitate the upper class for job marketability. In a low density population, labor is scarce, so the tendency is for employers to make the workplace attractive and down-to-earth. We see this in recent English history, where IIRC non-rhotic upper class English words like "burst"->"bust", "curse"->"cuss" predominated in cities. Though this still doesn't explain how a sound law originates in an upper/lower class to begin with.
8:22 I'm an L2 speaker and I TOO notice myself pronouncing it like [kx], it's that widespread.
You should do accent reviews, imo England would be the best as it’s so diverse (I would be honoured if you did my accent, Northumberland Pitmatic)
As a Russian sometimes I can notice how I pronounce words like Учитель/Teacher (Uchitiel’) more like Ущиель(Uschiel’),
Преподаватель/Teacher (Pripadavatiel’) more like Реааватцель (Reaavatsiel’),
Для/For (Dlya) like Ля (Lya),
Собой/?myself? (saboi) more like Саой (saoi),
Собираюсь/?Going? (sabiraius’) more like sairaius’…
It’s weird, but it’s way easier to pronounce. Also, the Moscow pronunciation is considered pretty funny here, but at the same time Moscow is basically center of the country (in all aspects)
Also, sometimes we pronounce “l” like “w”, and I just don’t know why. Happily its pretty rare.
recently i noticed that i pronounce the hard L as [w] too which made me think of how the Ł in Polish got shifted into that same sound from [ɫ], meaning that a similar change is not impossible to happen in the future of the russian language
when do you pronounce l as w?
Same thing bro. My reduction is not as heavy, but sometimes I drop some consonants in words like "сделает" (he/she/it will have done) as "деае(т)".A friend of mine sometimes says "паивет"[pəı'ʋʲet] instead "привет" [prʲɪ'vʲet].Being a person with a speech impediment (/r/ as /ʁ to the left, around velum/) I feel his pain so god damn much.
omg 🤯😮😱 I also pronounce L like w sometimes... I thought it was a southern thing though
@@MonolingualBeta I couldn't pronounce the r when I was little. Now I can but it is usually subtler. And I pay attention of the many ways I and other people say this sound. It changes from word to word and depending on speed as well.
If you do it more flowy it just sounds proper. Like perhaps the British would say this PROPer. The first r is half there and it's enough.
i sometimes make a mistake where ill say "he been working there" instead of "hes been working there." i usually correct it cuz it does make the grammar error part of my brain light up a bit every time, but thats probably a coming change in a few generations.
i also habitually say "i been doing that" instead of "i've been doing that" in casual speech and it never sounds wrong to me when i notice it
To me, it sounds weird entirely. As locally here "He been working there " doesn't work due to weak sounds, though I notice we lenite B into W/V categories, normal V typically rounds or front vowels. So "he's" isn't really any an option. "He has been working there " is used, but phonetically the vowels are so broken that a standard "20" jumped into 5+ due to unrounding vs. unrounding and harsh umlauting. I am guessing you speak AAVE? I am an Eastern accent speaker. So our sounds just mutate, break T, K, P, and F.
Just to demonstrate the brokeness quality of everything. "He has been working there" I am guessing you retain the "been?" part, here it is described as " mutated ".
Been = /bœn/ ~ /bn/ ~ /bm/. Too many front vowels before it. Sounds like used the wrong word order unintentionally as here it would be. Never forgetting your apostrophes.
Standard: ən ɪˈlɛktrɪk ˈskutər
Regionally: 'eøn'ʌ:ɫɛtɾ̥(ə)χ̞ skød:ɾ̥
"an" switched to 'eøn due to a front vowel..
@@MaoRattoi wouldnt say i speak AAVE, but i understand it, have family members who speak it, and have been undoubtedly influenced by it.
@@julienandross To me, AAVE is unintelligible due to not being stress based enough and uses regular tenses as... A good example of confusing if you use [is] vs. [are] if saying you is, or is you.
The sounds here WOULDN'T WORK due to. Who wants to contrast /ø/ with /ɪ/ or /ɛ/? Do you see how messy that is? Like a question in AAVE ( I stole it )
Who you think you iscomin home at this hour?
Here that question shifts into, " At this hour, who do you think you are for coming by just now"
(If extremely late) " It's exactly the opposite. As normally keeping phrases on time in the front, person/people in the back, with the odd change in syntax to keep it in coda for the verbs. Anything to keep verbs in front for questions, actions in the back of a phrase.
The English here was never influenced by AAVE, but kept an archaic syntax due to mountain isolation....
@@julienandross Or whenever they forget "an" vs "a", as it sounds like a prefix from my point of view. Hence causes confusion as the spoken form he does get contractions, I wouldn't be surprised if that's how languages can switch from 2 Genders to 3, then back 2 or 0 to 2 again. As the vowels here are just unstable.
You locally here would be " jø ", but sound quality I would say dictates grammar or if a language has an unstable sound inventory, it make use more complex verbs for its own sake like German.
yeah like that sentence example you gave to me at first sounded wrong because i was reading it on my screen. then i read it out loud to myself with proper intonation and i got it immediatley. i think it really is just an exposure thing. the language seems to be much more inflection based and nuianced than standard english
like me personally, id never say "who you think you is coming home this late?" thats just not how id say it. but i could totally hear someone in my family or a friend saying it and id get what they mean.
I've also done the plosive affrication. Mostly with /k/ but also /p/, not often with /t/ or if I do I don't notice it (I've watched videos about British people affricating /t/ into [ts] but for the life of me I can't hear it, even though I'm used to German's ), though the weird thing is that it's not something like /pf/ most the time but rather more like /px/, often before specific vowels. Doesn't feel comfortable before all vowels
I mainly only do it in emphatic speech though, so my impression is that it's mainly just the aspiration being realised as /x/ instead of /h/ rather than actual true affrication.
I do affricate T's a lot before /u/ but that's because I break /u/ into a frontal diphthong that causes it to palatise.
Never heard /t/ or /d/ affricate before a syllabic R myself, young or old, so I don't personally think it'll become common. My bet is rather on the R going away before that happens to be honest, but it might stay regional to wherever you come from
Makes sense to me as well, the /t/ and /d/ aren't actually merging with CH and J before R, they're merely becoming affricates which while similar to CH and J, do remain rhotic. It's like the aspiration devoiced the R of 'tr' fricatising it and becoming an affricate, and then this spread to D as well perhaps through analogy.
So immediate contact is necessary, which it doesn't have before "syllabic R" because there's a vowel in the way. I could see it happening as you describe, but I doubt it'll become common anywhere except your local regiolect, which considering how marked your accent is wouldn't surprise me
One other thing that seems to be happening in English is a change in the agreement in number between verbs and nouns. More and more it seems, when someone says something in the pattern of [subject] of [noun] [verb], the number of the verb agrees with whichever noun is immediately before the verb instead of agreeing with the subject.
Just found your channel. I want to sincerely thank you for the well-written and well-edited captions, including the IPA. ❤
Really helps me a lot to be able to read along with audio.
linguist say all languages will evolve to german in the end
We'll unclutter their language of the articles. About the time
Has anyone actually tested the ability to predict the future of a language? Like "based on historical linguistics we expect to see ______ in N years" and then waited N years to see if they were right? Linguistics is probably old enough now to have these studies right?
I don't know of any, and couldn't find them just now, but I would be interested
Maybe a linguist who knows Latin but none of the Romance languages should try!
@@davidp.7620 that is not what I am suggesting. I am saying that a linguist should make a prediction about the actual future (like, the year 2050) and then we see in 2050 if it's correct
@@violet_broregarde I know. I speak English
@@violet_broregardetypically don't evolve that fast. There's going to be very, very slight changes by then
literally can't wait for the next video, i really wanna see it rn.
i've always wondered about how my language might evolve but i kinda have no idea, somehow i can't really see or hear any sound changes
I speak finnish and I noticed that a lot of times my pronounciation of s between vowels turns to /z/ like the word for summer, kesä (/kesæ/) > /kezæ/. Or asia (/asia/) > /azia/. Sometimes I change the /h/ sound to a very clear /x/ sound but usually it comes after a vowel and it might be from influence of learning russian and german. All thanks to me speaking so fast that sometimes no one understands me
The glottis stop before words in German is a general feature and therefore not written. I recognised that more and more people by accident form a aspirated t before sch [ʃ]. They say things like, a t'schönen guten Tag. Das habe ich t'schon gemacht. I don't know why. And another thing in German due to mass migration, the closing of mid rounded or rounded vowels, also darkening most vowels to the back of your mouth.
Interesting. Maybe wordinitial /ʃ/ will become /tʃ/ in future German.
im in gen z. i pronounce /t/ as /ts/ word initially sometimes (quiet but its there). i am not near aave speakers in the slightest but i have some of the same grammatical constructions and cluster shortening. my pronounciation of is /wəɹz/. /n/ followed by a sonorant will turn the sonorant into an affricate. i actually have noticed some diphthongisations in my way of speaking. examples are /æ/ becoming /eə/ before nasal consonants, and /i/ becoming /iɪ/ word finally. a way of showing some of these would be the word , which i would say in my regular speech as /t(s)eəndz/.
a good example of progressive voice assimilation is with the english word "disgusting", which some people may mispronounce as "discusting", but never "dizgusting"
I'm watching Love Is Blind UK & there are whole sentences that I have no clue what they're saying. Not to mention plenty of stand alone words or phrases that are obviously not the same in the UK as they are in the US (for example, they use "buzzing" for a state of excitement & I only use that word for that state of almost drunk)
In the Malay Malaysian when we speak in casual speech, we tend to shorten word and change some vowel and consonant, for example:
Engkau > kau > ko
Tidak > tak > ak
Tahu > tau
Hendak > nak
Pergi > gi
Sahaja > je
We even do short form like,
yang - yg
bagi - bg
malas - mls
okay - k
tak - x
barang - brg
etc
Mostly we change grammar word and remove the vowel
au -> o and ai -> e are the holy grail of vowel shifts!
@@davidp.7620 that occurs in Indonesian. for example, pakai (wear) become pake. Correct me if I'm wrong tho
I see this channel for the first time and it's very interesting. You said that languages diverge over time even if they are relatively seperated not necessarily completely seperated. My gut tells me that with the wide spread adoption of the internet that most English accents aren't going to diverge to the point of unintellagibility. The internet ist just too much used to cause a seperation big enough for that.
This is of course only my gut feeling, but I would love to know your reasons why you think the internet (and in extend literature, songs, political speeches, memes, etc.) is not enough to prevent the divergence of English accents.
Btw. I'm a native German speaker.
Very good video, very interesting too. Especially the bit about female influence on language
I think a very common fortition pattern is semivowels changing to fricatives or occlusives: /w/ to /v/ or /b/, and /j/ to /ʝ/ /ɟ/ /ʒ/ /dʒ/ etc. Another one I can think of is the adoption of prothetic consonants before zero onset syllables or between two vowels, but I'm not sure if that is technically fortition
My dialect is in the process of adopting /ʝ/ as we use it as an allophone of /j/, but W hasn't occured, our B will weaken into W or V. As I notice in casual speech, we just weaken all voiceless consonants and shove them into the back of the mouth.
I think the idea of ONE "future American English" might be slightly misguided.
Pronunciation in English is more likely, in my opinion, to diverge into more localized groups, such as the Southwest, the South, the Midwest, the Great Lakes, New England (some of which, especially the ones settled earlier, have already carved out their own dialects).
I would say South East having the most common, but Appalachian influenced as a sub-category due to lenition is agressive on final syllables.
In Australia we wouldn’t change dirt to jurt coz we don’t pronounce the r, its said like dœt, it might become deht or doot , or even diht in future
gay man in utah, i of have the california vowel shift, and ive noticed it for years, but i wasn't able to find anything on it, sooooo thx
American and British English will definitely continue to evolve and diverge in the future, But I personally think it unlikely they'd become mutually unintelligible, Any sort of cataclysm that increases the isolation notwithstanding. I suppose I can't speak for _all_ Americans, But I personally interact with Brits (And speakers from other countries, such as Australia or Ireland, Not to mention numerous non-native speakers from around the world) pretty regularly, As do many other people I know, And it's also fairly common that I consume it via media, Listening to British Music, watching British TV shows, Et cetera, So it seems very likely to me that even if the two varieties diverge enough that someone raised to one in isolation would be unable to understand the other, I suspect most Americans and Brits would be able to understand eachother for the foreseeable future just because of the continuing interactions they already have, Not to mention it's just useful to be able to communicate with people without needing to learn a new language or hire a translator (Although granted machine translation will likely be higher quality in the future, So translations might come free.)
I made a Future British English video inspired by your American one last year!
Finalmente , vídeo do melhor UA-camr 🎉
I really doubt any dutch speaker would be able to understand casual afrikaans well in 100 years. Afrikaans vowels are really shifting currently and there's even tonogenesis happening.
something interesting i noticed is that i repeatedly say /tʃoxlət/ or cho/χ/late rather than "choclate"
Similar for me.
"analyzing yourself also works, provided you're somewhat high up in the hierarchy"
me being a 30y/o cis het man 😶 at least I'm urban I guess
You're not that far behind me lol
What if English develops a easier standardized version like Arabic which could be used as the International Language and such, and English-speaking countries can continue their ever changing vernaculars, even my country (Philippines) a non-native english speaking country developed its own dialect in the past 100+ years since we’ve been penetrated by the Anglosphere…
That is what I would do for the USA. Make a standard version, but locally, people use their own dialects with ITS OWN unique written standard system. For example as an Easterner, we struggle to understand AAVE due to... Consonants are TOO DISTANT, vowels are too warped from their perspective. Just generally grammar is a case of " wrong sounds and words ".
I noticed locally for us, we are turning K into /kx/ or /χ/ a soft /χ/. No longer having middle t or last syllable t's in our sound inventory... Same with D, basically commiting the crime of almost being closer to Danish, our vowels already growing. Though we would have to need a long vs. short in our script. Typically due to elision and lenition having been harsher or shifting sounds. light L's may just become tapped r's. As everyword with OO is basically a mess with little no to no constant sounds. Reading double OO is a death sentence if in some words. If Standard English has 20, we jumped that to 20 + 5 unrounded vowels, some nasal potentional for the 20 base pairs. I remember being on the phone to get my internet fixed, but we had to say Names just to have the letters " N " and " M " to be distinct as when saying " N and M" we are losing that contrast when a vowel is proceeds it while the town from us isn't as bad for the same loss of sounds.
The vernacular here basically took English, rural yet archaic.
The best way to demonstrate the brokenness quality...
Standard English: ən ɪˈlɛktrɪk ˈskutər
Regionally: 'eøn'ʌ:ɫɛtɾ̥(ə)χ̞ skød:ɾ̥
Standard: ɑkwə
Regionally: ɔ̝xwo ( the final o is very much closed, but give it time, we will end up rising it )
This is the Eastern USA for my part of the country.
As a turkish speaker(wiþ very little linguistic knowldge), i haven't noticed much, so ill just put my predictions in a lil comment here:
1. R becomes more like english's r(more... flowy? I guess)
2. E always becomes pronounced /æ/
(Ill probably add more later but there are all the ones i can currently think of)
My daily dose of linguistic interaction is mostly spent on the internet, in my second language
and i love that, though i'd love it if it was in my _third_ language - spanish
if rich teenage girls are the future of language why couldn't Gretchen make "fetch" happen??
methinks she probably tried too hard, and people generally like to stick it to the man, so to speak. and also, as said, vocabulary is a whole separate beast from what was discussed here, sound shifts.
Here's some random predictions I have for my native language, Swedish:
A lot of Swedish dialects merge /ɵ/ with /œ/ before /r/. Younger speakers of those dialects merge those in other positions as well, which I could see spreading to other dialects because of how unstable /ɵ/ probably is.
A new vowel phoneme, /aː/, occurs in slang (tja /ɕaː/), swearwords (fan /faːn/) and loanwords (masala /masaːla/). It's sometimes used instead of /ɑː/ in loanwords in a similar way to how speakers of American English replace stressed /æ/ in loanwords with /ɑ/ to sound more foreign (American English /vjetnæm/ becomes /vjetnɑm/, Swedish /masɑːla~masaːla/). Currently there are few situations where it can't be replaced with /ɑː/, but I could see it becoming more and more mandatory.
Aspirated plosives are consistently spirantised, so I could see the future American sound shift happening in future Swedish, especially with the influence English has on Swedish.
Pitch accent is currently getting leveled due to influence from immigrant languages.
I'm pretty confident that southern dialects will start pronouncing a trilled /r/ instead of a uvular one, as I've noticed most younger people in Scania and even most people in general where I live doing that.
I've noticed myself and others merging their retroflex consonants other than /ʈ/ and /ʂ/ with their alveolars. This might be because I live in a region where a previous uvular /r/ has recently been replaced with a trill. /ʈ/ is usually an affricate at the end of words, and I could see it becoming an affricate in other positions as well. The /ʈʂ/ clusters would also get reinterpreted as an affricate. The merging of retroflex consonants with alveolars would phonemise the pre-rhotic allophones of vowels, which was already phonemic in my dialect.
I could see /ɕ/ and /ʂ/ becoming reanalysed as allophones of eachother, since they appear in complementary distribution. Maybe also a /tɕ~tʂ/ complementary distribution corresponding to English /tʃ/, with /ɕ~ʂ/ corresponding to English /ʃ/. I think onset position /tʃ/ would become [tɕ] because that's how I pronounce "chicken tikka masala" while speaking Swedish. With this, "church" would be theoretically loaned into future Swedish as [tɕɚtʂ]. My guess on English /ʃ/ becoming /ɕ~ʂ/ in Swedish is based on how the word "brorsa" is sometimes spelled "brosha", on how "shots" is loaned into Swedish as /ɕɔts/ and on how I speak English. Some English loanwords will change from previous /ɕ ɧ/ to /tɕ~tʂ ɕ~ʂ/, and others will stay the same.
Funny enough my accent... As an Southern Appalachian, we will merge or shift /tʃ/ to /tɕ/ as I notice when speaking we shift so often between /ɕ/ and /ʃ/. So we will probably be the only accent to drop ʃ in our sound inventory or have just an allophone situation. We don't have a fully /ʃ and tʃ/ or one that is in the process of deleting if there are vowels in a V_C_V situation or L shows up to break things. Dark L to be exact.
This video is amazing! I love linguistics!!!
I mean a "modern standard English" variant still can become a way for future English speakers with their dialects to understand one common tongue (or even displace the dialects that form within the English-speaking community).
For example, when I looked into Chinese history and they also had many dialects (including in the north to my surprise). Then throughout the 20th century thanks to Standard Chinese (a mix of Mandarin dialects) their language became more unified.
edit: OFC the south still has its many regional languages/dialects? like Hokkien, Cantonese, Wu, etc...
Ooh, at 2:08 you make the point that AmE and BrE will diverge to the point of mutual unintelligibility, but the spellings probably won't be updated. So this means that you'll possibly end up with a situation where the two languages are mutually unintelligible in speech, but mutually intelligible in writing.
Kinda how it's easier for Afrikaans and Dutch speakers to understand each other's written forms than the spoken forms.
(Also, thinking about it, the same may apply to Contemporary English vs. Early Modern/Middle English. Like how knight would've been something like /kniçt/ rather than /nɑĭt/ (idk if that's correct, I suck at writing IPA for English vowels))
eg. in Dutch and Afrikaans there are differences in pronunciation, especially in long vowels and diphthongs, which are not reflected in spelling which makes the written languages more mutually comprehensible. See Dutch /f, v, ʋ/ → Afrikaans /f, f, v/, where I believe Dutch /f, v/ are still spelled in Afrikaans despite both being pronounced /f/, and /ʋ/ is still spelled despite being pronounced /v/.
One can compare spelling diffs. to pronunciation diffs: (Do note that → /V:.CV/ and → /V.CV/, so eg is read more as "weete", so similar to rather than )
know: vs | /vɪə.tə/ vs /ʋeːt/
catch: vs | /faŋ/ vs /vɑ.ŋə/
brush/sweep: vs | /fɪə/ vs /veː.ɣə/ (Afrikaans devoiced /ɣ/ → /x/, and deletes intervocalic /x/, leading to oog/oë, boog/boë, rather than expected oog/oge, boog/boge, so an Afrikaans person could recognise as similar to *_veën_)
cattle/livestock (coll.): vs | /fɪə/ vs /veː/
Though, even in writing, Dutch and Afrikaans aren't completely mutually intelligible anymore (but it doesn't take much practice for one to understand the other, though rapid speech can be tough without more practice). I'd say that when I first read a Dutch book (maybe age ten or twelve, with no previous experience) I caught perhaps 50% (much more than I can do with German for example, even after some practice), and after just a few months of practice it shot up to ~80%, even though reading Dutch was still slower and more mentally taxing than reading Afrikaans - learning how er, zij, and het are used in Dutch helped a lot. I am told, however, that the Dutch understand Afrikaans easier than the other way round, cause we've simplified a bunch of grammar. (That is, until we start speaking of _baaidjies_ or _kieries_ or _abba_ or _donga_ or _gogga_, cause we've borrowed some from Malay and Khoisan and Bantu languages)
Also, elision can get extreme in rapid (or tired) speech, I myself have noticed /ek əs ni mux ni/ *"I is not tired not" → * [æk.si mu.xi] or even → *
I've noticed people soften words even when it's supposed to be stressed. Like 'tuh' instead of 'to'. "I'm going tuh the store"
i think we can also predict the destruction of the "on-line" in american english. i already see this in myself, where my dad pronounces the word as [än] but my mother from jersey says [ɔn].
because of the AAVE influence in my family as well i usually say [ɔn] but occasionally i'll say [än]. with AAVE becoming more influential i could see [ɔn] becoming the more widespread pronunciation in the urban north.
As much as i love these videos, i find them a bit impenetrable. I would like to learn enough to understand and predict the future of my own canadian english, but im unsure of where to start.
if we “fix” our spelling we’re just gonna cause more problems. we’re used to it now, that’s just how our language is
I would say it would lead to fixing is worth it. Due to if got countless vowel shifts or in the bad situation where my accent doesn't really follow the same vowel rules. It makes half of all vowels per sentence don't correspond or the irregular form is preferable due to serious elision shows up everywhere. Though would change words like " Everywhere to fix the "ver" party into VR in its spelling. Depending on the vowels here. It switches very often where front vowels e, ɛ, i, ɪ are gaining their rounded versions, while unrounded versions occur with the back vowels due to how back consonants influence the sounds harshly. K, T, D, F, B, P, and the voiceless th are basically about to go under a consonant shift and vowel shift. So you can have a word like Pine vs. Piney having a case of ablaut where "Pine " here said with ɐj ( with nasal ), but that extra /i/ in Piney turns into /ɤy/ in that vowel space. Due to a more closed mouth position when making /i~ɨ/.As more than half of the consonants will turn fricatives or affricates. For labial sounds or front ones, that will be the case. I notice that our v has a bad tendency to round vowels.
Maybe a good idea will be a video about Amharic language? Because you recordes videos about two important semitic languages: Hebrew and Arabic, so you could now record the video about Amharic.
At 5:00
I find this kind of law intersting and I am looking for any academic literature that mentioned it.
Did you predict skibidi? I don't think so
Bro what
Is this like standard American English because I’d argue my dialect the Worcester Massachusetts accent is a lot more different than standard American English. For example we tend to break of the ending nasal sounds of words and add it to the front of the next word when the next word starts with a vowel, making sentences sounding like ca ni getta can a coke (can I get can of coke). And we also have strong intrusive r like pronouncing sods as soder, or idea as idear. We also have a pretty clear T stop, k stop, and p stop shift to glottal stop at the end of words and sometimes in the middle of words, making coke sound like Co’ (‘ being a glottal stop) and Cat sound like Cae’. We also tend to nasalize words that end in nasals and just don’t pronounce the final nasal consonant we nasalize the vowel before it like Can sounds more like Cá (á being a nasalized a) and Can’t being pronounce Cá’. We also tend to make a lot of words like of, to, and a just become schwa. And finally the obvious one we have a non rhotic accent so we just don’t pronounce R’s at the end of words and it often leads to us lengthening the vowels within those words make ran into ráa (a pronounced ae). We also tend to make some random words that start with R we fully pronounce the vowels almost like in Rain instead of being one syllable we tend to say Ra-in, and ran would be re an (pronounced ray-an even though there isn’t an e in it idk why). But anyway that’s just some of the stuff I can think of in my Accent.
As a Southern Appalachian. That's more or less a similar situation, Soda stays as soda, but our labial sounds have been shifting into fricatives, our V has a bad tendency to round front vowels. Cat it typically in the process of losing voicing on final d, and often confusing it with glottalization. We typically make all words with a final M or N into nasal, which is noticeable in words like Doom, Whom, Comb when not pluralized. In the process of redeveloping long vs. short due to the fricatives and dropping of dental sounds in coda positions or being like French where they are inert. Where to form a C_V order for all words, the difference between Hard attack vs. Heart attack is confusing. Though unintentionally add schwa to words like " ran " to avoid losing the N. T/D basically only work on voicing with vowels, B/P distinct, though our avlealor consonants are about to just drop affricate's into fricatives, so words with GE/DGE/J and CH/TCH aren't discerned from ʃ/ʒ or very poorly. The Dark L will be the only L, while light l will be turned into a patched up tapped R, as COOL VS. COOLER get confused and turn L into R. Lake and Rake are discerned, K is just broken in the process of becoming velar or uvular. So K = /kx~x~χ/ If we ever had a reform, we would end up with the most reformed writing due to vowels are multiplying.
As a hindi speaker, I usually drop the h/ह in hai/है and hun/हूँ
I think linguistic differentiation results from climate differences, isolation, and war. So I don't think it's entirely possible to predict future language drift. Wars sometimes are entirely unexpected. Though, because of much reduced isolation thanks to internet and climate control thanks to heating and air conditioning we can expect accents and languages to converge further. Mandarin will wind up replacing all the dialects except perhaps Cantonese and Cantonese related dialects, for example. The North South accent divergence in USA was very significant 50 years ago when I was a child, and now is basically non-existent. The transatlantic accent differences are also converging. I don't however note such convergence with English as spoken in India and have not heard a Jamaican accent in 40 years so that would be interesting to hear.
I am a younger male living in canada and I find myself pronouncing /g/ either like /ɣ/ or /ɰ/ (not sure which but I think it might be the former) in certain positions
In the Southern USA, Specifically Appalachia, we are in a similar case, but /g/ is closer /ɣ/ and generally make words throatier. Though we are about to turn /k/ into /kx/ ~ /x/ ~ /χ
~χʌ/. Maybe lose our light l's in favor of a tapped R, dental first syllables being alright.... Here due to the R, being in the back of the mouth, it is turning either tapped or going to switch into ʁ, once the middle R, turning into a back R. While having an R depending on the consonant before it due to a high stress in first syllables here. Words like green use that ɣ here.
At 9:05 you said "that" like British with their intonation.
At 8:52 your "common" has the added hard h after the c. It really creeps into the American English. Same with words "possible" and similar (po, co) beginnings. Sounds like p.h.o.s.i.b.l, and that h is like the French r or the Dutch g.
I suppose on the dirt and dert diffrensmce seems to round out the vocals to track along it faster , wich seems to be consistent imo
*skip becoming _skiph_ and *watar becoming _watsar_ may not be wrong after all, as in modern German, those words are Schiff and Wasser respectively.
Quick question bro how many languages do u know and how did you study them so fast (answer in romanian for practice 😉)
My Predictions for my dialect of English, Received Pronunciation:
/ð/ is already often pronounced as [d̪] word-initially and [v] elsewhere, so I think /ð/ will merge with [d] and [v] in these positions and /θ/ will merge with /f/ in all positions
The Post-Alveolar fricatives and affricates become Alveolo-Palatal
/l/ vocalisation and /t/ glottalisation will become standard, but then [ʔ] and intervocalic [ɫ] could also be lost, meaning a words like butter and colour would be pronounced [bɐə] and [kɐʊə]. Then [ə] is likely to be dropped and compensatorily lengthen the preceding vowel giving [bɐː] and [kɐːʊ]
Vowels will probably be nasalised when followed by /n/ word finally, removing the nasal consonant
[pn̩] and [kn̩] will become [ʔm̩] and [ʔŋ̩]
/r/ will become [ʋ] or perhaps [ɹ̠ᶹ]
/h/ will be lost
The voicing distinction between /p/ /t/ /k/ /t͡ɕ/ and /b/ /d/ /g/ /d͡ʑ/ could be lost, creating a pure aspiration distinction
Triphthongs and some diphthongs are already reducing, so:
[ɑɪə] > [ɑː]
[aʊə] [aʊ] > [aː]
[əʊə] [əʊ] > [ɜː]
[eɪə] [eɪ] > [ɛː]
[ɔɪə] [ɔɪ] > [ɔː]
I think a major vowel shift is likely to happen, and I think it's already starting. This is my general idea:
[ɪ] > [ɘ]
[ɒ] > [o]
[ʌ] > [ɐ]
[iː] > [ei]
[ɛː] > [æː]
[ɑː] > [ɐː]
[ɔː] > [uː]
[uː] > [yː]
Which region are you South Eastern? As we will retain /h/ well on the edge of the south and Southern Appalachia. Though we will collapse the p, b, f into fricatives. I remember, just today in the store, heard the almost deletion of /dʒ/... D is going to be removed, we will just lose t/d for the voiced vs. unvoiced, but it does have a tendency to switch to /ȶɕ/ or at least retroflex with more use of the teeth. While in day to day, t/d are reducing in coda positions, or being treated as one of the same sound in coda positions. For basic words like "it" or heart/hard, it has a hard time telling the difference if there are vowels after it. The nasal vowel impact will happen. Our K is basically soft and may either shift into cʰ and its variants or go full throaty and just shift with /x~kx~χ ( just softer ) / Leading to an ich-laut system. /g/ will turn into /ɣ/ in the presence of a dark L or middle R, our light l's may just do what Portuguese vs. Spanish did, shift into tapped r. We are in the process of shifting our whole vowel system
If the word has a final /i~ɨ/ and the diphthong in question is
/ɐj/, then will shift front and mutate into /øy/ As Pine, Piney, Pie DON'T USE THE SAME VOWELS here at all. We do loan words from Spanish leading to having retained /ä + ɑ/ ( due to enviromental conditions. An here has mutated into from /ən/, but if /ɛ, e/ show up, the indefinite article turns into /eøn/, but leads the /ɛ/ to switch to a back vowel /ʌ/. We switching into a Deutsch system? As vowels in these situations are going from Front to back, but the closed mouth position of "an" shifted into fronting that monster.
When it comes to vowel correspondence vs. RP speakers.
Heed = y: Vowel formant: 1803 perfectly on /y/'s top 2120 vs. 317, in the process of devoicing, but pitch wise drops. One stop from mixing heat and heed. A word with " /i/"? Yet not even the case.
Beat = yʏ vowel formant: 1789, the b is becoming a fricative
Hid = e: as our vowel "Supposed to be a "[ɪ], but in reality is closer to that.
Bit = œ (Due to a Fricative is messing up B's dramatically )
Hate =ø̞e vowel formant 1400, but a diphthong
Bait = ɛy, our t's are weak. There is a noticeable vowel drift, due to the influence of B/P not acting normal. These are the supposed " e "
Had = æ:
Bat = æ̈
So our front vowels are basically fucked over.
Hot =/= Bought truncation is noticeable.
We'll end up with 26, the round vs. unrounded, almost like Danish.
6:23 intersectionality, linguistic edition
What can explain me seeing the "gh" at the end of "enough" and "tough" being pronounced as "θ" instaid of "f"? Like maybe the easier to pronounce, but in the way where it's easier to read? Kind of like making gh the same sound as th because they generally sound the same and look basically the same?
That is probably due to if hear /f/ as /θ/ that is probably an allophone is about to start.
If people start living much longer (scientists say we could live up to 20,000 years if aging was ever cured), would linguistic change be slowed down, or would people only be able to understand those who were born close to when they were?
Just a question: do you also think the palatalisation before syllabic r will also happen to s and z, resulting in, for example, ʃɚkɫ and ɹ̠eɪʒɚ?
@@mattking9220 in some dialects it is very possible (probably Philly)
I feel like to do this I gotta start walking around just recording everything I or my friends say, So I can better notice little mistakes or peculiarities.
What will Scots sound like?
8:44 Arabic /f/ becoming /p/ in Indonesian be like 🥴
That's different, since Indonesian didn't evolve from Arabic. Since /p/ is native in Indonesian and /f/ isn't, that's just Indonesian speakers making the Arabic loanword easier to pronounce for them
@@watchyourlanguage3870 what is interesting tho is that many people start to pronounce those used-to-be /f/ as /f/ again, just very inconsistently as they sometimes pronounce what originally /p/ as /f/
14:55 interesting.Аbout a month ago I started pronouncing the Russian word "Hoнсенс" (nonsens) as "Нонценц" (nontsents).Same applies to "Санжар - Санджар" (Sanzhar - Sanjar), "ганзолька - гандзолька" (ganzol'ka - gandzol'ka), "Аншлаг - антшлаг" (anshlag - anchlag).I was curious about how this phenomenon is called and now I know.
I feel like the "dr/tr to jr/chr" shift would be more likely to happen than the "dVr/tVr to jVr/chVr" shift. Sorry for the lack of IPA, typing IPA symbols on the phone is a hassle.
Does that mean that we will all be speaking the valley girl accent in the future 😨😨😨
Hopefully no
@@đœwæþ Good god that accent locally here is a good way to be talked down around here or people just avoid talking with you. As a south easterner. Valley girl accent is annoying as it has poor grammar and repeats too many words, and locally here. We basically have the habit of turning front unrounded vowels into rounded front vowels due to not pronouncing all of the letters in a closed mouth position. Often using a fricative for everything.
I seak Bulgarian-Turkish and in our area we say (yes)->Ya (Elder Flower)->Ohlambi, and some other goups say (yes)->Ye (Elder Flower)->Oolambi
We do have an American term for "Posh." It's called "bougie."
I don't know if I'm describing it well, but to me at least, "posh" is more old money and "bougie" is more new money. So they're not perfectly synonymous to me
Elderly men from the countryside being the slowest to progress sounded unlikely to me at first but then I thought about how my Grandpa talked and realized that pronouncing "washed" as "warshed" is definitely an example
Is he from the PNW?
@@bananaman4131 Nope, Iowa
In the case of Portuguese, it's rapidly approaching English and Spanish.
Regarding Spanish, with the growth of the Brazilian spoken variety, it is closer to Spanish.
And regarding Portuguese with English words or words derived from English, there are:
Internet
Mouse
Delete / deletar
Wi-fi
Headset
Site
Online
Offline
Shampoo
Cotonete (coton net)
Hamburguer
Cream cheese
Bacon
Cupcake
Diet
Fast food
Milk shake
Katchup
Picles (pickles)
Waffle
Boxe (box)
Baseball
Basquete (basketball)
Vôlei (volleyball)
Surf / surfar (surf / surfing)
Jeans
Short (shorts)
Tênis (tennis)
Blazer
Hobby
Videogame
Trailer
Spoiler
Best seller
Táxi (taxi)
Pickup (pickup truck)
Freezer
Frigobar
Cooler
Grill (Grilling Machine)
Design
Laser
Botox
And much more...
Very enjoyable video, also helps to know some general trends in sound changes for conlangs
13:22 While others have brought up other examples, to me Korean comes to mind as a language that doesn't assimilate /n/ before velars, eg. 인간 [in.gan] "human being", 친구 [tɕin.gu] "friend", 안경 [an.gjʌŋ] "glasses"...
Russian also does that except unlike Korean it lacks a contrast with /ŋ/.
The same in Polish -- in some regional varieties "Lenka" (diminutive female name from "Lena") and "lęka" ("it is affraid") are homofones /lɛŋka/, but in others (including official), "Lenka" is /lɛnka/ with unassimilated /n/.
if this is anything, i often had fricatives turn into affricates (at least for me) e.g. [θ] > [t͡θ], [s] > [t͡s]
"don't even attempt future vocabulary, it will get you nowhere"
As in, it's impossible to predict future vocabulary and therefore it's a futile process? That feels like a reductive point of view to me, especially if the whole point is to have fun constructing a language based on a language you're innately familiar with.
Is predicting phonology and grammar any more possible to predict? Maybe, but i reckon it's not actually that much. All you can reasonably do is extrapolate from current and historical sound and grammar changes, and that only goes so far. Similarly, you can only predict vocabulary changes based on trends in the past or processes ongoing in the present, even if what you can predict is a more limited than phonology and grammar. I do see your point in that it's probably not as fun, but it feels kind of redactive to say that it's a futile activity.
Also, it's definitely possible (although i do agree that it's improbable) for British and American to merge. The trend over time is that people are more attached to the internet as time goes on, and the more on-the-internet you are, the easier it is to speak with people from far-away places. I assume that that trend will eventually stop because i don't think most humans want to end up like the people in Wall-E, but hey, maybe that's the dystopia we're headed towards.
Another thing you have to consider is how the perception of gender, race, and the urban/rural divide is changing in American society, although that requires the prediction of America's political future, which is very difficult to do. Definitely an interesting thought experiment though: how will American politics affect American society, and how will that different society affect the future American language? how will those effects change continuously over time?
If you want to make a conlang of Future American and therefore have new vocabulary, that's perfectly fine, and not futile, but that was never my goal. For my own goal of trying to predict the likely trajectory of American English, predicting vocab is, in fact, futile
One language that surprisingly doesn't have nk, ng → ŋk, ŋg assimilation is Russian. Which is one of the reasons why the cyrillization of Chinese uses -н for final -ng and -нь for final -n.
I only learned yesterday that practise is the correct spelling in british english, I always thought people just spelled the word wrong.
Would American English involve modern day Canada or will there be a future Canadian language
@@luckyave777 there will still be a Canadian dialect, but I think we’ll still be able to understand each other
@@watchyourlanguage3870 interesting, there seems to be this pillar of changes being language to accent to dialect to new language in linguistics
@@luckyave777 Accent vs dialect isn’t really different, “accent” is just a narrower term for “dialect” that only involves pronunciation and may occasionally have a connotation of non-standardness. But yes, that’s how languages develop away from each other
@@watchyourlanguage3870 makes sense, it’s super sad we won’t be able to hear future languages because they take a long time to develop
ua-cam.com/video/7psnXnaARRU/v-deo.htmlsi=NzqBocyvJt4pa3je I decided to make my own video about the topic
I hate when people say "Gen Alpha is cooked" because they speak a "bad" version of english. It is not bad english that's how English is suppose to evolve.
@ryanpmcguire 1. You dont understand how language works 2. the internet age exposes us to more people than we could have ever previously thought possibly, so statistically youre more likely to encounter people who might have lower literacy skills as opposed to watching man on the street interviews on tv
@@ryanpmcguire I hate when people say that that era of English is better than this era because at the end of the day language is evolving and back then they think the language they spoke back then was inferior to middle english or something like that
I would say Gen Z forgot how to umlaut as. I know one co-worker that says "GasLighted" not "Gaslit" As that's disgusting. Seriously, you are a native speaker and I would say... The quality degradation has declined from 2020 vs now. Where I constantly find typos in basic sections. I get short-handing everything, but it is sad that non-natives are either getting better than natives or natives just can't read or write anymore. Only focus on all syllables, instead of just the first only.
@@MaoRattoI take it someone like you, dislikes slayed and prefers slew?
@@MaoRatto I can see a reason for using ''gaslighted'' instead of ''gaslit'' seeing how the ''light'' in ''gaslight'' comes from the noun light and not the verb light, so ''gaslit'' is treating the ''light'' part as if it came from the verb and not the noun. Though I always found ''gaslit'' to be more intuitive to me imo.
Also ''gaslighted'' is already an adjective meaning illuminated by a gas light.
How does rhythm and cadence feature into linguistic predictions? English since Middle English has a pretty distinctive iambic rhythm that shares some features with other Germanic languages (e.g. stress timing) but is certainly pretty far from the mean (compare Old English, which is a much more "typical" sounding Germanic language). How might this aspect of "Future American" change, especially with influence from Spanish, a syllable-timed language?
@@tankermottind For your first question, the isochrony of a language mostly changes as a result of other features changing. For example, in French: Latin was probably to some extent mora-timed, due to having both vowel length and consonant gemination distinction. But then it would’ve become stress-timed, as the gemination left and French started reducing its vowels, many of which would later drop off entirely, making French now syllable-timed (except not exactly, bc there are still some reduced syllables that get said, like “que”).
As far as Future American adopting Spanish syllable-timing, I mean, maybe, but English has reduced vowels that are easier to say short, so I wouldn’t bet on it, unless those vowels either stop being reduced or disappear altogether (neither of which is likely)
@@watchyourlanguage3870 It's not just that though, but also the way stress is allocated within words and the way words "naturally" fit together--like compare Beowulf to The Canterbury Tales. Both feature stress-timed languages, but Chaucer's Middle English has a very familiar rhythm to Modern English speakers, while Beowulf's Old English does not.
@@tankermottind idk all that poetry stuff
Big linguistics words you frickativ
Still enjoyed the video
Not to mention, regarding intelligability... have you ever heard the way East Germans talk? It's intelligable, sure, but they do have a very distinct dialect after just 40 years of relative isolation.
Or take Low German and Swiss German. Both are considered German, but they are so far apart, they might aswell be different languages.