Congratulations, you've been given a free pass to be frozen until any chosen date in the future where you will wake up and continue your life. When would you like to wake up and why?

The written Icelandic language is the same now as it was ~1000 years ago. Someone from 1100 AD Iceland could travel to the modern day and communicate perfectly fine by writing. Even speaking it is pretty close.

English has evolved because of the influence of outside groups. It's been decently static for centuries. You could go to a play performed by time traveling Shakespearean actors, and they'd sound kind of like they have a very thick Yorkshire accent but be otherwise intelligible. Middle English developed from a foreign invasion (giving a lot of Romance vocab), Modern English developed from standardization attempts which ceased after their initial attempts. So basically the languages evolve because of things like fragmentation and recombination.

We're not going to see the same thing anymore. Even if two English speaking groups are somehow divided (like North America vs UK), there's still a fuckton of communication. Americans and Englishmen are chatting on the same internet, they're watching the same TV and movies, they're reading the same books. There's not as much of an opportunity for divergence as there was when every village was its own unique entity. And because people will be constantly consuming media from the past (like how Gone with the Wind is still popular today despite being almost 80 years old) it'll reduce the temporal changes. Language will be different to an extent, especially slang, but it's more likely that English will have evolved to the point where you merely sound old fashioned, not totally unintelligible.

A bigger worry would be a global language standardization. If you go to the future and everyone's speaking a conlang like Esperanto, then you're kinda fucked.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent