Isn’t it amazing how language perpetuates itself? We tend to look at the world as a set of tangible objects interacting with each other. But there is so much more going on around us. A language exists like a creature, modifying itself through centuries and individuals, often going through natural selection, sometimes being conquered and sometimes even dying, all without our notice. It is estimated today that 50% of languages in the world are on the verge of extinction. That just shows you what a mono-culture we are headed towards.

Context speaks louder than words. The average English speaking adult has a vocabulary of about 40,000 – 60,000 words. The more verbose English speaker can reach about 80,000. But how do we reach these staggering numbers? By no means have any of us looked in a dictionary that many times. Neither do we use thesauruses or wikipedia to learn that many new words. When learning language for the first time, human babies start with about 10 or so words. In a week, they will know hundreds. Of course this is not so clear while actually interacting with a child, but given the limited control they have over their tongue and larynx, several of the words they utter are hidden in their subtle babbles. If you bring in pantomime into the picture, the numbers become even more amazing.

Let’s go into a thought experiment then: let’s consider the world from the point of view of a language.

However they are born (if anyone knows, please tell me), languages are always changing. Any already existing phoneme can undergo a number of morphs. The most common ones occur because of a lack of the tongue’s ability to keep up. If your currently extant ‘noise articulation’ set is very different from a newly imported sound, your tongue will look for a way to minimize that new sound – to save the time and effort of going in another direction. ‘Flapping’ is an example of this. It is often associated with the North American accent, for example, over the phoneme ‘t-h’. Usually, to produce the ‘t’ sound, our tongue lines up with the top of our upper teeth, and waits their until enough air-pressure builds up behind it to cause it to ‘pop’. That pop sound is the sound of the letter ‘t’. As you can imagine, in terms of time invested, this is a taxing consonant to produce. So in saving time and energy, the tongue creates a kind of a pseudo-pronunciation of it. As an example, look at the word ‘impor-t-ant’. The North American accent skips over the first t, roughly pronouncing the word ‘impor-ay-ant’. The ‘ay’ is appended with a soft ‘pop’ similar to a ‘t’. The proper British accent on the other hand, goes through the trouble of actually stressing the ‘t’. But that is probably only because those are the prominent sounds in those accents.

But as you approach the ‘Southern’ accent, this habit of flapping becomes more prominent. So much so, that I think we are almost on the verge of a new sound: a combination of ‘r’ and a soft ‘t’ – ‘rt’ said very fast and harshly. So perhaps if this accent remains isolated for long enough, there will be a new sound in it’s inventory. Words like ’shutter’, ‘butter’, and ‘mutter’ will sound almost unrecognizable. Further, to make the rest of the set fit in with a new dominant sound, other sounds are going to be modified also. Currently, the Irish/Scottish and the Newfie accents lie at a distant tangent from common-English, where our hypothetically morphed-language might live.

Imagine other types of flapping also, over sounds like ‘d-h’. The new sound produced from it might be ‘dt’ pronounced very fast and harshly. If you flip English through enough of it’s common phonemes, you can see how even distant languages of the same family tree are related. Wikipedia lists several other ‘manners of articulation’ also that could all be modified simultaneously to produce new languages on the fly. Check out their wiki articles: Plosive, Nasal stop, Fricative, Affricate, Trill, Approximant.

As I mentioned above, about 50% of modern languages are in an immediate threat of extinction. Of course this is not something to be concerned about in the same way as say, endangered species. But the statistic is surely indicative of something. I believe it shows an unfortunate but unstoppable trend towards a global acculturation reducing cultures and religions on planet Earth to only a handful. I have an upcoming article about what I believe is the unfortunate contribution of the modern atheist to this phenomenon. I’m sure I’ll pick up a lot of lip for it!