The Big Question: Can the English Language Die

For now, English is international and dominant, but as the Romans might have said, nothing lasts forever.

By the end of this century, some estimates suggest that 1,500 languages - nearly a quarter of the world's languages - could disappear, but some might find it obscene to even ask whether English will soon be considered "dead."

English is certainly not on the endangered list. As the only truly global language, it is more often referred to as an exterminator, a huge, bulky "titanosaurus" that unwittingly crushes hapless small languages under its feet - or under its tongue.

In reality, however, no language has yet proven to be eternal. The subjects of the Roman Empire or Ancient Egypt might once have assumed that their languages would last forever, as would their hegemony, but they were wrong. Latin and Egyptian eventually evolved into languages that were incomprehensible to Augustus or Ramses the Great.

"English could certainly die, just like Egyptian," says linguist Martin Haspelmath of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "The more interesting questions are: when and how?".

Most linguists would say that predicting the future of any language is speculative. The code by which humans communicate is subject to so many complex and interacting forces that until artificial intelligence can help find patterns in the vast amount of data, humanity can do nothing but speculate.

It doesn't help that humans can't look far back in time for precedents either: Homo sapiens have been babbling for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years, but they didn't get around to writing down their pearls of wisdom until about 5,000 years ago, when the Sumerians invented writing. Nevertheless, most experts agree on a few basic principles.

Some predict that international migration will increase as the climate crisis intensifies and technological innovation accelerates, but these are not the only factors. Widespread literacy and schooling, only a few hundred years old, act as a brake on linguistic evolution by imposing common standards.

As if that were not enough, experts believe that the configuration of the linguistic landscape is terribly susceptible to "black swan" type events - those defined by their unpredictability. The Egyptian language survived the arrival of the Greeks, Romans and Christianity, but not Arabic and Islam in the seventh century AD. No one knows why.

In other words, humanity is in uncharted territory. English may come under pressure as a global lingua franca if China replaces the US as the dominant global superpower and India abandons English as an official language.

Demographic factors could lead to the rise of African lingua francas - such as Lingala and Swahili, as well as other inherited colonial languages such as French and Portuguese - and Spanish in the Americas, and without any major war. "In a hundred years, the world could be a very different place," says Haspelmath.

But in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand are still likely to speak English. And we need to distinguish between two phenomena: the changing size of the English language's holdings and its own internal evolution. Today, English exists in many colloquial variants, much as Latin did before it became saturated with Romance languages.

These variants are held together by a common written form and the Internet - glue forces that were absent in the late Roman Empire, most of whose subjects were illiterate - so English is unlikely to go the way of Latin.

On the other hand, the balance of power between the variants is likely to shift, and standards will no longer be set by American and British speakers of English (unless the former retain control over communication technologies).

West African pidgin, a Creole language heavily influenced by English, was spoken by a few thousand people two centuries ago, but it is now the dominant language of West Africa, and linguist Kofi Yakpo of the University of Hong Kong predicts that 400 million people will speak it by 2100.

It is largely a spoken language, so pidgin speakers switch to English when writing. "It's quite clear that in half a century, Nigerians or Indians will write more books in English than people in the UK," says Yakpo. "This means that Nigerian and Indian colloquialisms will start to enter 'standard' English as these new titans pull the lexical blanket over themselves, so to speak."

The vocabulary of a language - its words - is usually the fastest growing component. Sounds, or phonology, i.e. accents, and grammar are usually more conservative, but changes in them are necessary to make a language incomprehensible to its original speakers - that is, to turn it into a new language.

So even if 50 years from now New Yorkers and Londoners call liquor or booze by the pidgin word "ogogoru," they will still probably speak languages that today's Londoners and New Yorkers can understand.

The combined effects of migration and technology on the nature of English are more difficult to predict. While language development has never stood still, the increasing influx of non-native speakers of English into strongholds of English-speaking culture such as the UK and North America may be the beginning of a period of accelerated change, leading to the emergence of a new language in need of a new name, such as postmodern English.

But a backlash that leads to less porous borders and tighter language policies could mitigate this situation. And if machine translation becomes widespread, both residents and immigrants will be spared the need to learn each other's languages.

At the very least, this technology could provide a buffer to stem the flow of borrowing between languages or language variants, once again counteracting the effects of migration.

The point is that even if scientists can't predict how English will change, people can be sure that it will, and that even the first - and so far only - international language is not immune to extinction. Latin and Egyptian have been spoken for over 2,000 years, and English has been around for about 1,500 years. It looks quite healthy now, some might even say "overly healthy", but its days may still be numbered.