Comment by biff1
4 days ago
If it’s the quantity, wouldn’t people just drop English all to gather? (I’m not a proscriptivist for the record, but I do like some non-English languages more than others. Hopefully that’s not too verboten to confess here lol.)
I don’t think it’s verboten! I prefer Turkish over French.
English will certainly continue to evolve, and eventually it may be dropped altogether. But for example, you couldn’t understand English as it was spoken in the 1400s. It is different enough that we have a separate name for it, “Middle English”. Many of the changes languages undergo are influenced by interacting with other languages. There’s no reason to believe English will stop now.
As to why English will probably keep evolving instead of being totally dropped — it is now the lingua franca for most of the world. It would be unlikely to “just drop” the most useful language 90% of people know.