Globalisation and language change

[sasasha]

Does anyone have any interesting reading to point me to or thoughts about how globalisation affects language change?

A thought that occurred to me just now, whilst realising I have watched so much of Kim's Convenience that I am quite often thinking in a potentially fairly fictional Korean-based L2 form of English today, was that modern globalisation processes are so unique and exponentially powerful over time that their effects on language change have no precedent.

Is it possible that globalisation processes change things up so much that we might see potentially drastically new sociolinguistic process emerging? Sociolinguistic factors behind language change no longer being tied in to actual communities and their interactions, but online communities instead, for instance (there has to be plenty of documentation of this already...?).

Or how about a situation in which individuals who participate in one world language at whatever level become so accustomed to hearing, reacting to, and switching between a huge variety of other sociolects which once they would never have encountered that the whole concept of the idiolect itself starts to degrade, the idea of standardised languages starts to go out of the window much like the idea of nationalistic states in a hypothetical transition to a world government (/insert utopian/dystopian variation on that here) and we end up with... Some sort of interesting deregulated expressive mush?

Neuroenhancement could be an interesting partner process in shaping such mushy, ubernetworked patterns of communication across the globe.

Apologies for layman's terminology, and that this is probably all a little insane, but interested in any thoughts that are out there.

Also, new board! Gosh. Nice, I guess.

[mèþru]

Globalisation has sped up the replacement of non-standard varieties. It also has helped minority languages find new methods of preservation and communities who spoke now extinct languages find linguists willing to help revive them.

[sasasha]

Globalisation has sped up the replacement of non-standard varieties. It also has helped minority languages find new methods of preservation and communities who spoke now extinct languages find linguists willing to help revive them.

All true, but I'm wondering if non-standard varieties are also being disseminated, collated, or even created by globalisation. And if the concept of standardness is also somehow in flux.

[Ares Land]

A random thought that occured to me. It makes sense to me, but I can't exactly prove it; so it might be deep, but it might be stupid.
Aren't most current languages, in a way, the result of limited forms of globalization?

When were the last times wildly different cultures were unexpectedly brought together?

• The expansion of Islam, with the spread of Arabic dialects
• The Roman Empire, with Romance languages as the ultimate consequences
• Hellenistic cultures, with Koine greek
• Han and Tang China, with Old Chinese and Middle Chinese.

Going even further, whatever caused the Indo-Europeans or Semitic peoples to expand? That one might be a stretch.

If that model is correct, expect everybody to start speaking a common dialect of English, with pre-globalization varieties of English disappearing almost without a trace.

[Travis B.]

If that model is correct, expect everybody to start speaking a common dialect of English, with pre-globalization varieties of English disappearing almost without a trace.

However, with English, it seems that there are two processes taking place - a loss of local dialects, but simultaneously an emergence of regional dialects - rather than a complete leveling of varieties across the board. Take for instance the development of regional vowel shifts within NAE; one would not expect this were the overall trend be complete dialect leveling.

Whether this will result eventually in a breakup of English into multiple Anglic languages or whether merely will form a non-negligible level of retained dialect variation within English has yet to be seen; while some may compare the future of English to Romance, Arabic, or Chinese, English itself has remained quite coherent over the number of centuries it has been spread outside of Great Britain. (Consider how NAE and EE have remained close enough together to have few mutual intelligibility issues, while in the same time span Dutch and Afrikaans have definitely separated into different languages.)

[zompist]

Globalisation has sped up the replacement of non-standard varieties. It also has helped minority languages find new methods of preservation and communities who spoke now extinct languages find linguists willing to help revive them.

This. Everyone gets so worked up over "global English" or whatever that we can miss how technology could actually enable other languages to flourish.

E.g. one of the Quechua resources from the other thread mentions that these days, even older people in small towns in Ecuador have cell phones... and companies are marketing to them in Quechua. That's a device that can knit together communities that once would have been overwhelmingly pressured to speak only Spanish.

Google Translate currently ranges between mediocre and broken. But a mediocre translation is good enough for many purposes. More importantly: it gets better all the time. Imagine it in 25 or 50 years. Will people still feel they have to learn English if they can immediately access a pretty-good translation of virtually anything?

I'd also make my usual point about mass media, which is that it affects speech far less than people think. We've had TV and radio for close to a hundred years, and it hasn't made Southern English or AAVE disappear. You don't learn your language from TV or the Internet. You learn it from your friends, up through your teenage years. What really levels out dialects is people moving around at an early enough age. (Obviously, slang and memes can spread through the media.)

Also, FWIW, some very old-fashioned processes like war and scarcity will affect the status of languages in the long term. In my own sf future, the US, Europe, and China fall apart, and once the world picks up the pieces the major languages are Portuguese and Swahili. (Come to think of it, I should add Indonesian.)

[Ares Land]

What zompist said makes me think of a related phenomenon. As a direct consequence of texting and Facebook (or so it seems), Moroccans have started writing in darija (which was I believe unthinkable twenty years ago; back then it was either French or MSA).

So, I guess I'll have to wait for cryonics to improve.