Our great-grandchildren will speak a wildly different English - Quartz - 0 views
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The global role English plays today as a lingua franca—used as a means of communication by speakers of different languages—has parallels in the Latin of pre-modern Europe.
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Having been spread by the success of the Roman Empire, Classical Latin was kept alive as a standard written medium throughout Europe long after the fall of Rome. But the Vulgar Latin used in speech continued to change, forming new dialects, which in time gave rise to the modern Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Italian.
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Similar developments may be traced today in the use of English around the globe, especially in countries where it functions as a second language. New “interlanguages” are emerging, in which features of English are mingled with those of other native tongues and their pronunciations.
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