I'm a fledgling author (published a couple of eBooks, which I am told is not as "official" as print books, but it's something), and I am gearing up to write a book series. The task is both extremely exciting and overwhelming, but I'm greatly enjoying the preparatory research.

The story takes place at least a couple of centuries in the future, but I am presented with a problem regarding language.

Diachronic Linguistics. Idioms, vocabulary, etc. in use now might seem very much out of place in a futuristic setting. For example, "He wouldn't hurt a fly" might be completely inappropriate for someone who has lived in a sterile environment for most of his life, such as in a spacecraft. Though I could be careful of avoiding this mistake, to guess at what the equivalent idiom might be two hundred years in the future is like Chaucer trying to come up with "pimp my ride".

Also, as the author, I must give the reader a sense of this evolution of language without making the reader feel like Chaucer dropped into 21st-century New York, trying to figure out what everyone is saying. An excellent example of this is the TV series Firefly, in which the characters mainly speak in English (with a touch of old Western slang), but curse in Chinese and use the word "shiny" like we might use "good" or "cool".

So, I would like to ask everyone a few questions.

1) What is your take on the future of language? English is already a glorious hodgepodge of many languages, but how will English--or language in general--evolve?

2) Do you know of any books or articles that address this topic?

The only thing certain about the future is its uncertainty. And that includes the future of language.

Having said which, as nobody will be able to dispute your choice of words for at least 200 years, I'd not worry. Just choose words and idiom that appeal to you, bearing in mind that your choices should be understandable to your readers, and create away!

This is a problem that science fiction/fantasy authors always face and there are really three ways you can go with it. Most authors plump for option number one and ignore the problem totally using current language trends just ovoiding the more obvious traps, such as the "fly" example that you propose, if they happen to think of them.

Some go the route of avoiding idiom altogether and writing in an idiom-free version of the language. This may confer a greater longevity on the work but can also give it a certain sterility of style.

The third option is what I think of as "the Clockwork Orange solution" where you invent your own language (Nadsat in the case of ACO). If your book is set a long way in the future the language will probably be extremely different to the language we speak now (take a look at Canterbury Tales) and it will have changed in unpredictable ways.

So you pay your money and you take your choice. Personally I'd just go with the first option and avoid any awkward idioms that occur to me as I'm writing. I'd probably avoid making up new idioms unless they were absolutely clear from the context. I've read tons of futuristic fiction and I always find they jar me out of the story.

On the plus side kudos for considering it at all. It shows that you care about your fiction and your readers. Good luck with the writing.

Oh yes. Something I forgot.
On the subject of how it will evolve I'd say that UK English is currently being influenced from two radically different directions. Our shifting population is currently undergoing an influx of Arabic speaking Moslems and I suspect that we will start to see more and more Arabic words and expressions creep into the language (not that we don't have them already). At the same time television and the internet are, especially at slang and colloquial levels, causing some "Americanisation" (I'm not commenting on whether that's good/bad/neither, just noting the trend.)

How these two influences will continue and balance and what other influences (perhaps Eastern European languages) will come to the fore is anyone's guess.

1) What is your take on the future of language? English is already a glorious hodgepodge of many languages, but how will English--or language in general--evolve?

Linguists agree on one thing: languages change over the course of time. There's no avoiding it, but some non-linguists like to think that it is. You can look to the history of various languages in the world for some pointers. Latin changed over a period of about 100 years from Old Latin to Classical, and finally Late Latin, but the changes were not even as great as those between Middle English and Present-Day English. At some point after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Latin started to evolve radically. The result was the Romance languages of today: Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, Spanish, Provencal, French, Italian, Romanian, Dalmatian (extinct), Romantsh, Sardinian, and Ladino. In the sense that Present-Day English is Old English at a later period, all these Romance languages are Neo-Latin, and, on the whole, mutually unintelligible. JRR Tolkien went to an extreme in his Lord of the Rings trilogy: he invented many languages, various cultures, and a whole slew of literature and history to go with it, but his books were not written in these languages, rather he used them as a kind of spice to the story, which was written in plain old English as it was at his time with some purposeful archaisms. He also discussed some meta-linguistic issues, too. An interesting conceit between his writing of The Hobbit and the latter books is that Westron, the language spoken by many within Middle Earth, on the whole was translated as English. So, so the Shire, where Bilbo and Frodo live, is actually called Sûzat in Westron and i Drann in Sindarin.

2) Do you know of any books or articles that address this topic?

Yes. One of the best is a book by W.E. Meyers, Aliens and Linguistics: Language Study and Science Fiction (1980) and a short introduction online. The is another, more academic, book I know of by David Sisk, Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias. You might want to look at Suzette Haden Elgin's blog, Ozarque, and have read about Láadan, the language she constructed for her novel Native Tongue.

You use the term, diachronic linguistics (aka historical-comparative linguistics), so I take it you have some familiarity with linguistics. That is a good place to start. You might want to look at Winfred P. Lehmann, Historical Linguistics, Theodora Bynon, Historical Linguistics, or for a detailed view of how languages change, HH Hock, Principles of historical linguistics.

Burgess' device in A Clockwork Orange (as mentioned by Bob above) was to posit a future UK where the language of his youth gangs has been profoundly affected by Russian. The language remains understandable English, but there are a huge number of lexical substitutions. Nadsat is more of a jargon or cant than an actual language. There is a novel set in the future (also in the UK), that is written in the mutated English of its time, as it is a first person narrative. Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker.

Another thing you want to investigate is the whole artificial language subfield of study. The best known are Esperanto (an auxiliary language or auxlang) and Klingon (a constructed language or conlang). Take a look at the Wikipedia article, which will point you to other online resources, such as mail lists and Wikis.

Good luck with your writing and welcome to the board.

Wow, thanks for all the great input!

I'm looking forward to visiting this board often!

quote:

Say it, don't sparge it.

Sparging, in UK English, is part of the process of brewing beer.

How do you use the word?

Just making a (bad) joke. The definition for sparge also lists sprinkle or spray. Look here near the bottom for the Wordcraft entry. A famous '80s/'90s saying in the States was "Say it, don't spray it", something witty to say when someone is talking to you and accidentally spits at you.

That's what it is in brewing - spraying the barley to dissolve the malt.

Why is it that genetic evolution tends to flourish in small isolated populations (as on remote oceanic islands) while language evolution tends to do the opposite under the same conditions?

quote:

Why is it that genetic evolution tends to flourish in small isolated populations (as on remote oceanic islands)

I don't think it does. I think it may move in unusual -- from the continental point of view -- directions, like Hawaiian ant-eating caterpillars, but as Darwin first pointed out in The Origin of Species, continental invaders frequently overrun islands, but island species almost never invade continents. Indigenous island species tend to be much more specialized for a particular niche.

Ruby, I've been thinking about your question about the future of language. I agree with Bob's post above about more Arabic words creeping into our language...as well as words from other cultures, such as Africa. However, I also think the Internet will continue to affect out language. Think about it. We Google for information, buy things on Ebay, look for things on Craig's List, etc. Ten years ago, even, we weren't doing that.