The languages are simplifying

[Radical Mandarin]

It's hard to deny the fact that languages are becoming simpler and simpler as the time goes by.

 

Grammar, phonetics, writing 等等

 

There used to be be more tones in Mandarin than now. A lot of finales (consonants at the end of syllables) that used to be there have disappeared as well. Cantonese preserved more finales and more tones, and yet it still apparently lost a lot.

 

English has been going through the same process.  A lot of native speakers will now drop "t" at the end of a word - "I didn' wan' a be dere" sounds just as natural as "I didn'T wanT To be there".  "D" is disapearing too. "Gonna come 'roun?" "Ee' was jus' way too lou‘ an' I coudn 'ear a soun' " is not difficult to understand..

 

In some Indo-European languages cases and grammar are becoming simpler as well.

 

I met a Chinese (speaking Mandarin) person today. As always, I imitated his "accent" . I found myself saying something resembling ni kankan-a, renmenzenme.. and this this person had no touble at all understanding me. Actually, most people I talk to seem to have the same way of pronouncing stuff.

 

What are your thoughts about this global simplifying phenomenon?

[Hofmann]

Grammaticalization cycle.

[陳德聰]

Hofmann beat me to it.

[LiMo]

I'm not a linguist so I'll probably be shot down quickly on this one. 

 

I'm not sure if that's strictly the case that languages are getting less complex. It's easy to notice when new forms arise especially when things are left out and drastically altered. Take text message shorthand for example. There was a huge hullabaloo about how these young kids were bastardising the language a few years ago but I myself see very little if any of it in everyday life (I'm 20 so I'm not far removed from said horrible kiddies), but funnily enough I see much more of it from non-natives than I do from natives, perhaps it's something with trying to imitate native speakers habitats but no one's told them that this particular fad is over now. My little hypothesis is that smart phones and full sized keyboards with auto-correct erased the "need" to use such abbreviations.

 

Spoken language is a little bit easier. Haven't people always been sloppy and laid back since time immemorial. I'm perfectly capable of enunciating all the sounds in a word when it's really necessary, at interviews for example, but can I really be bothered when I'm down the pub with my mates? Here's the time to betray my ignorance but unless a person was very upper class was it ever the done thing to pronounce things like the t's at the end of words like "didn't?" I know that the current received pronunciation (British) "accent" does that, but as it's not an accent according to my friend (although Wikipedia thinks so), I can only assume it was something agreed upon at some point by some upper class folk, and therefore can it be considered representative of English at all? (This is pure speculation, please correct me if I'm wrong.) Perhaps it's the case that we are simply being exposed to many more people with non-standard accents than we would have been before, so we think there's some kind of revolution 'appening, when in fact they always spoke like that in Newcastle but we just never knew about it

 

In terms of vocabulary languages are surely increasing in word count at least, I'm aware that's not really the type of complexity you're talking about, but then again in a language like Chinese that has so few sounds the more new concepts you have the more you will fall prey to the frustrating amount of homophones, or you will just have to make do with very many big words to explain simple things. Maybe.

 

My two cents.

[Bad Cao Cao]

The McWhorter language optimizing/streamlining argument.

 

For some languages, this appears to be the case. Standard Indonesian being the archetypal case.

 

http://polydog.org/index.php?threads/where-is-esperanto-headed.93/

 

One of the cases against Mandarin being a truly global language is also often framed in these terms.

 

http://www.wsj.com/articles/what-the-world-will-speak-in-2115-1420234648

 

The reality is, this is already true. A globish-simple-no-genders-cases-etc --- is already the world's major language -- and this trend continues, while many other languages die off at a rapid rate.