What present-day major languages are going to lose importance in the future?

[Yvaelle]

That dream is very far away. It relies on two incredibly tough challenges:

1. Bidirectional, real-time translation of human languages
2. Human brain interfaces that can read either a language or thoughts.

At the pace of technological advancement, barring a dark age, both of those will be solved well within the next 100 years - I'm being generous.

Human languages will be around for a long time, certainly within even the life of someone born right now.

I didn't say languages would cease to exist, but we won't rely on them as we do today. I speak an embarrassing amount of Sindarin Elvish, a fictional language spoken by Elves in JRR Tolkien's fantasy novels. I don't rely on Sindarin for anything. This will be the fate of all human languages in time.

In the future of tomorrow, I will play a virtual reality game in which an Elf walks up to me and chats me up in Sindarin - and I will understand him - and you may well too. Just as I would for someone speaking Welsh or Swahili - augmented intelligence will reach a point where we all comprehend many languages. Yet, by the time intelligence is more easily traversable between machines and minds, the boundary to translating through thoughts alone - meaning without translation and comprehension - will be upon us.

By comparison to the natural consolidation of language that would otherwise occur over centuries or millennia - worrying about which language will become the One Language To Rule Them All, is useless - because we'll all be machines long before that day.

[Deleted]

By comparison to the natural consolidation of language that would otherwise occur over centuries or millennia - worrying about which language will become the One Language To Rule Them All, is useless - because we'll all be machines long before that day.

That's a fair point.

[Vash The Stampede]

Only English and Mandarin will be around, with everything else you learn for national pride or for fun.

[Mormolyce]

I'd say its a great tragedy they didn't.

My parents made sure Welsh was my first language and I'm happy for it. I intend to do the same for my kids.

Well my father was Australian, my mother was born in Scotland, but she didn't speak Gaelic. I don't think any of my extended family on that side did either.

I think there's a much bigger push for language preservation in Wales, according to wiki only 1% of Scots speak Scottish Gaelic.

Still, I don't think Gaelic is in my blood. It might've been cool to learn it if anyone in my family had spoken it, but I think this idea that you're deprived somehow if you're born into a different language to (some of) your ancestors is kind of silly.

P.S. Haggis tastes horrible, kilts are itchy, I can get behind deep fried Mars bars though :P

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By comparison to the natural consolidation of language that would otherwise occur over centuries or millennia - worrying about which language will become the One Language To Rule Them All, is useless - because we'll all be machines long before that day.

Better teach your kids binary!

[Theodarzna]

At the pace of technological advancement, barring a dark age, both of those will be solved well within the next 100 years - I'm being generous.



I didn't say languages would cease to exist, but we won't rely on them as we do today. I speak an embarrassing amount of Sindarin Elvish, a fictional language spoken by Elves in JRR Tolkien's fantasy novels. I don't rely on Sindarin for anything. This will be the fate of all human languages in time.

In the future of tomorrow, I will play a virtual reality game in which an Elf walks up to me and chats me up in Sindarin - and I will understand him - and you may well too. Just as I would for someone speaking Welsh or Swahili - augmented intelligence will reach a point where we all comprehend many languages. Yet, by the time intelligence is more easily traversable between machines and minds, the boundary to translating through thoughts alone - meaning without translation and comprehension - will be upon us.

By comparison to the natural consolidation of language that would otherwise occur over centuries or millennia - worrying about which language will become the One Language To Rule Them All, is useless - because we'll all be machines long before that day.

I will actually take a completely different take, Technology will be the salvation OF most languages because in practical terms they remove the one grave challenge many communities face linguistically speaking, that being space.

50 years ago someone like me would have lost much of her native language by now, because as a Welsh speaker living in America I would have few people to speak to. I believe technical translation services will be a thing but they won't lead to one consolidated spoken human language, instead they will allow languages to proliferate again as there will be no exact need to lose ones own language and no spatial barrier between you and speakers. If not for facetime, skype and twitter I probably would not have retained my Welsh as well as I have.

Also as for translation technology, its not really technology since its indirectly crowdsourcing actual human translators, it just avoids paying them.

[Tackhisis]

Machine translation will never become usable. It is simply impossible for a machine to interpret the text, and heuristic approaches used by modern systems are never be on par with human conscience.

[Vash The Stampede]

Even Mandarin has serious limits. English will be the #1 language spoken in the world. Consider that the Chinese can't use Mandarin keyboards because of how many characters they use. It's damn near infinite.

Most frequently used 1,000 characters: 90% (Coverage rate)

Most frequently used 2,500 characters: 98.0% (Coverage rate)

Most frequently used 3,500 characters: 99.5% (Coverage rate)

So you either make a 1,000 key keyboard or learn english. For the most part, the Chinese use English keyboards because Mandarin wouldn't work well. They have to do a combination of keystrokes to type Mandarin though.

[Deleted]

Russian, French and Portuguese will be totally marginalized.

Englich, Mandarin and Spanish will increase.

[Masark]

So you either make a 1,000 key keyboard or learn english. For the most part, the Chinese use English keyboards because Mandarin wouldn't work well. They have to do a combination of keystrokes to type Mandarin though.

Just the sounds that each letter/letter combination corresponds to (no need to know English grammar, syntax, or vocabulary) or what letters correspond to what shapes (not even that if the keyboard is labelled appropriately).

[Deleted]

I live in Sweden, my perception is that German was an major language in my grand-parents generation. They are dead.

Yes at that time the German language did have the same status as English has in today's Sweden.

[Hooked]

French and Japanese.

[Forogil]

Some words such as m8, gg, and L33t will never be words.

According to dictionary.com: m8, gg, and l33t are in Collins Complete & Unabridged dictionary. So, they are already "words".

However, I doubt that l33t will be long-lived, gg might disappear - or just stay as a not widely used word, whereas m8 and similar abbreviations such as h8 are technology-dependent - what is likely to happen is that programs will auto-correct them (I guess some programs already do that) , and then they will mostly disappear.

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Languages I expect to increase are of course, C, Java, Python, HTML, and of course, Binary.

Languages I expect to decline are all the wordy ones.

Binary is unlikely to increase, but hexadecimal will fill that spot (octal doesn't align with bytes and is thus too awkward).
I would have hoped that C++ would have taken the spot from C, but alas that is not the case. http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index

(Although I am more confused by the rising popularity of COBOL - such that it will soon eclipse Objective C; and Lua is below both.)

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Hopefully none go away.

Too late for that.

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Actually the presence of English in the EU is up for debate now that the UK with England is gone. While Ireland does predominately speak English its official language is actually Irish as registered with the EU, so actually there is no English speaking voice in the EU or there won't be soon.

That is possible - but I don't think it will happen.
It assumes that neither Ireland (nor Malta) changes their official language in EU, and assuming that the Brexit will happen and be complete (with no Scottish re-entry).

Since English language is dominant in Ireland the Irish would certainly want English to remain an EU-language, but preferably while keeping the previous status for the Irish language. It already seems that Irish is less of an EU-language than the other ones.

However, English might still decline in popularity in the EU due to this, since Ireland has less political power than the UK.

[Yvaelle]

Binary is unlikely to increase, but hexadecimal will fill that spot (octal doesn't align with bytes and is thus too awkward).
I would have hoped that C++ would have taken the spot from C, but alas that is not the case. http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index

(Although I am more confused by the rising popularity of COBOL - such that it will soon eclipse Objective C; and Lua is below both.)

IANAEE (I am not an electrical engineer), but if I'm not mistaken - binary will remain the base language of computers until we have multi-state switches, like qubits (quantum computer switches). Hex still needs to be translated into binary, so binary remains the greatest language - since it is how machines translate all our other languages so they can talk amongst themselves, and then occasionally leer and point at us, so we know they're talking about us.

[Puupi]

That would be Khoisan

"Long time lurker, first time poster"

It's almost as if you had been waiting years for someone to ask "what is the language that uses clicks?!" and now you entered the stage!

[Forogil]

IANAEE (I am not an electrical engineer), but if I'm not mistaken - binary will remain the base language of computers until we have multi-state switches, like qubits (quantum computer switches). Hex still needs to be translated into binary, so binary remains the greatest language - since it is how machines translate all our other languages so they can talk amongst themselves, and then occasionally leer and point at us, so we know they're talking about us.

It depends on how you look at it.
If you look at individual memory cells then binary is appropriate for simple cases - but you almost always group them together and then hexadecimal works just as fine from the computer perspective - and is shorter on the screen, and even with binary we have to map from binary/hexadecimal to memory addresses, and we can normally not address individual bits (or nibbles), making it more complicated.

And modern computers are getting complicated and the bits stored in (ecc-)memory, on hard-disk, transmitted as EM-waves, are not exactly the bits you actually consider - so if we already consider an abstraction we might as well use hexadecimal numbers - and there are several cases where people use hexadecimal numbers.

I don't know how qubits will change this. There has been attempts at building computers with 3-valued logic, but they never caught on.

[Elegiac]

French and Japanese.

French still has a fairly significant footprint in its former dominions, particularly West Africa; granted, of the major languages (English, Mandarin, and Spanish) it's going to be the poor relation.

[dextersmith]

According to dictionary.com: m8, gg, and l33t are in Collins Complete & Unabridged dictionary. So, they are already "words".

However, I doubt that l33t will be long-lived, gg might disappear - or just stay as a not widely used word, whereas m8 and similar abbreviations such as h8 are technology-dependent - what is likely to happen is that programs will auto-correct them (I guess some programs already do that) , and then they will mostly disappear.

Abbreviations and mixed letters with numbers are not words. Ok, tv, vcr, and dvd aren't either.

[Elegiac]

Abbreviations and mixed letters with numbers are not words.

According to whom?

[Yvaelle]

I don't know how qubits will change this. There has been attempts at building computers with 3-valued logic, but they never caught on.

Qubits are naturally multi-state switches because they include not just the orientation, but the super-positions as well - so in addition to be massively parallel, they also are multi-state bits.

[xChurch]

Everything that isn't English.