Predicting Future American: Sound changes in American English that could possibly happen

Sorry I sound unfluent in the ending monologue, I was literally reading IPA off my script of a language that doesn’t exist yet and tryna make it sound natural lol

Links:

[sunnowo]

American English slowly becoming Dutch

[thof]

So, American English will turn into German without the complicated grammar and with a Spanish accent? ;)

[Orenotter]

A couple of things I think will permanently alter the course of language changes:
1. Audio/video recording.
2. Worldwide real-time communication.
We've only had these for about a hundred years, give or take. We have no model for how they affect accents, dialects and languages.

[LibertyJefferson]

I think Spanglish will actually become a more formalized dialect in the future. I kind of use a version in my day-to-day life where I combine the two to communicate, since I'm not yet fluent in Spanosh. Or if I'm asked something in Spanish, I'll respond in English, or vice-versa. My current girlfriend and I especially basically have our own way of communication like this to get past the language barrier.

[angeldude]

I don't think American English will lose mutual intelligibility with British English. If it were to happen, it would've been before the internet and global TV and radio. If anything, the increasing interconnectivity of the world might actually make the two groups of dialects to slowly grow _less_ distinct over time.
P.S. My response to people proposing Y'all is that English doesn't lack a good second person plural pronoun. What we lack is a second person _singular_ pronoun, though we didn't always. I prepose we revive "thou" as the old second person singular pronoun before it got conquered by the plural form.

[reillycurran]

That monologue sounds like a Russian trying to speak with an American accent

[danielpetersen]

You are already speaking an American English different from the one I learned in the 1950's. You speak about 50% faster than me and you slur and slide words into the next. I have trouble understanding my grandchildren unless they slow down and enunciate.

[DiMacky]

Something I have been seeing is young Americans adopting UK vowels, especially young people exposed to British youtubers or TV. On the flip side, I also personally know several English people, who despite never leaving England, have since the advent of the internet their vowels have become more flattened liked Americans, still obviously British, but meeting in the middle. It's almost as though the invented mid-atlantic accent is sort of coming to life naturally because of the internet. However, also because of the internet people with different interests can really cater their content, rather than seeing the same California/New York produced media everyone used to consume, so I predict going forward there will be less dialectal unity among Americans and more geographic, subcultural, and maybe even political influences on dialects. A dialect expert in the not too different future may be able to tell with reasonable accuracy whether someone is a left wing anime fan Buddhist, or a right wing street-racing Orthodox Christian just by how they pronounce their words because each person's speech is dictated by their subculture membership.

[thomas]

To your mutual intelligibility point: I'm British myself and could MOSTLY understand what you were saying, and I imagine that Future Brits would gradually get used to the Future American Accent alongside its natural development, so I doubt mutual intelligibility would be lost.

[Scoinsoffaterocks]

The final version sounds very slurred. I think you probably got a lot of reductions and simplifications right, but I also think the language would compensate with new sounds.

Props for thinking about this tho, first video I've seen tackling this subject!

[iluvcookfood]

Can you do the future of Mexican Spanish! In northern Mexico we have a lot of English origin words in our Spanish that others in Mexico wouldn’t use, and then there are words that derive from English used all over Mexico like “Stalkear”

[jaws]

this video already crossed the line of mutual intelligibility for me

[lagomoof]

At the end I was thinking "this sounds like French or Russian" but there's the Hispanic influence too. There already is a letter dropping, syllable crunching, western European language that sounds a bit Russian: It's Portuguese. Maybe this Future American is following the same evolution model but starting with English rather than medieval Latin. 🤔

[nozrep]

A new “Spanglish” creole hybrid type of language already exists in Texas and the southwest. I do not think anybody has documented it formally, nor really talks about it in formal linguistical science circles. But it definitely exists and I definitely have coworkers who I hear speak it on a daily basis. I do not speak it though. Haha but my kids probably will.

[Belenus]

The section about AAVE is interesting. I know a bunch of gen z and many of them already talk with that accent. Apparently it’s happening in the Netherlands too, where young Dutch are talking in a way influenced by middle eastern immigrants

[Phoros]

Wow I felt like someone who doesn’t speak english listening to this guy talk, something about how he’s almost slurring his words I thought he was speaking german for a minute I could not tell what he was saying unless he really enunciated a certain word. That is such an interesting phenomenon, I want to hear more of it

[jic]

Unless we are talking about a civilizational collapse with a near-complete lack of transatlantic communication, I find it extremely unlikely that American and British English will become mutually unintelligible, because we will read each other's books and watch each other's movies.

[drakedbz]

The most likely of these changes to happen is for y'all to become more common. I'm from near Chicago, where that word is never spoken except in AAVE, and did not pick it up from them. Instead, I've picked it up as a result of being in online communities so much that it's become difficult to avoid using the word. I give that shift a few generations to happen.

As far as American and British English diverging, I highly doubt this will happen, as we communicate with them much more regularly now due to the internet age. The assumption they would be mutually unintelligible assumes isolation, which is not the case in the 21st century.

[montymaybe]

I don't know why this popped into my feed or what compelled me to watch all of it as this isn't necessarily the type of video I watch, but this was incredibly fascinating. Great video, keep up the great work!

[erickmagana]

As a native Spanish speaker I find some English sounds difficult to distinguish. We only have 5 simple vowels and not a lot of consonants so words like "through the mountains" are sometimes a challenge to me. I also cannot distinguish /h/ from /x/ very well, so my guess is that as English becomes lingua franca and more people adopt it as their second language, English is going to become more and more unified and simplified, e.g. the regularization of verbs and the reduction of vowels and consonants through "polarization" in order to create more contrast between similar sounds, like the sound ae→a, or th→d.