DOI: 10.1126/science.1096546, 1329 (2004);303 Science

David GraddolThe Future of Language

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V I E W P O I N T

The Future of LanguageDavid Graddol*

The world’s language system is undergoing rapid change because of demographictrends, new technology, and international communication. These changes willaffect both written and spoken communication. English may not be the dominantlanguage of the future, and the need to be multilingual will be enhanced.Although many languages are going extinct, new ones are emerging in cities andextended social groups.

We are living through an extraordinary mo-ment of linguistic history. The world’s lan-guage system, having evolved over centuries,has reached a point of crisis and is nowrapidly restructuring. We will experiencesome decades of rapid, and perhaps disorient-ing change, after which a new linguisticworld order will emerge. Precise predictionsmay be difficult, but the general shape ofthings to come is clear (1).

The Demographic FutureGlobal demography is one cause of the lan-guage crisis. The world’s population roserapidly during the 20th century, but the majorincrease took place in less developed coun-tries. This trend, decade on decade, is trans-forming the global “league table” of languag-es, as based on native speaker numbers. The“top 10” languages at the end ofthe 20th century (Table 1) are notrepresentative of the estimatedusage of young people in 2050(Table 2).

Estimating native speaker num-bers for the larger—and otherwisebest documented—languages suchas English is surprisingly difficult.The numbers provided in Tables 1and 2 are based on United Nationspopulation projections and esti-mates of the linguistic demographyof each country—a technique thatis approximate but that allows prin-cipled projections of future lan-guage usage.

One perhaps unexpected trendis a relative decline of English, asprojected in Fig. 1. In the mid-20th century, nearly 9% of the global popu-lation grew up speaking English as their firstlanguage, but that proportion is declining—toward nearer 5% by 2050 (2).

Chinese (whether one counts only Man-darin or all Chinese dialects, which share acommon writing system) is well established

as the world’s largest language (in terms ofnative speakers), and its position will remainunchallenged. The next four major languages,however, are gradually converging and arelikely to be equally ranked by 2050, withArabic rising as English declines. But thecombined “market share” of these larger lan-guages taken together is unlikely to changemuch over the coming decades. It is thelanguages of the next rank—such as Bengali,Tamil, and Malay—which are growing mostrapidly.

The Future of DiversityWhile a few languages compete for positionat the top of the world hierarchy, there isdevastation at the base. Most linguists agreethat roughly 6000 languages exist in theworld today. Yet 90% of these may be

doomed to extinction, with much of this losshappening in the coming century. We maynow be losing a language every day.

Public awareness of such language losswill grow, as will an appreciation of its widerimplications. Regret at the passing of quaintand linguistically interesting languages maybe replaced by concern about their strategicand economic importance. In 2001 the UnitedNations Environmental Programme (UNEP)concluded that “Losing a language and itscultural context is like burning a unique ref-

erence book of the natural world” and linkedindigenous languages with “a vital under-standing of sustainable land management andof cultivation practices which exploit diver-sity (3).”

However, while we lose older, rural lan-guages, new urban hybrid forms may helpmaintain global diversity. Cities are placeswhere languages mingle and where languagechange speeds up. And the fast growing ur-ban areas of the world are breeding groundsfor new hybrid languages—just as hundredsof new forms of English have already beenspawned around the world (4).

Paradoxically, cities of the future willalso allow immigrant languages to survive.Ethnic minorities often now belong to di-asporic communities, within which mem-bers travel, watch the same films and sat-ellite television channels, and communicatedaily by telephone or e-mail. Everywhere,the social identities and networks that lan-guages reflect and construct are becomingdispersed and less geographically tied. Wecan expect the continued decline of tradi-tional geographically based dialects.

The End of ModernLanguagesMany of these trends will chal-lenge our sense of what is normalin language matters, shaped as ithas been by a centuries-long ex-perience of modernity. Modernityarose from complex historicalfactors including the emergenceof sovereign nation states, capi-talist societies, the protestant ref-ormation in northern Europe, andthe development of printing,which disseminated identical cop-ies of standard texts. Modernityalso gave us “modern languages,”each a national language that hasbenefited from centuries of devel-opment in its grammatical and

lexical resources.In English, for example, the “national lan-

guage project” began with literature in the16th century (poets and dramatists such asDryden and Shakespeare attempted to reme-dy the defects of English as compared withLatin and Greek); science was added in the17th century (Sir Isaac Newton publishedfirst in Latin, later in English); dictionariesand grammars were created in the 18th cen-tury (Samuel Johnson); and the 19th centurybrought corporate affairs, modern advertis-

The English Company (UK) Ltd., 2 Western Road,Wolverton, Milton Keynes, MK12 5AF, UK.

*To whom correspondence should be addressed.E-mail: david@english.co.uk

Fig. 1. The changing percentage of the world’s population speakingEnglish, Spanish, Hindi/Urdu, and Arabic.

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ing, international diplomacy, and many othernew forms of communication (5).

But the whole modernity project may nowbe unraveling, taking us into new linguisticlandscapes. The “old” national languages arelosing functionality as much communica-tion—economic, cultural, and political—be-comes international. Swedish, like manysmaller European languages, is now posi-tioned more as a local language of solidaritythan one for science, university education, orEuropean communication.

Big languages like English, meanwhile,have lost armies of linguistic gatekeeperswho used to ensure that only the language ofa social elite—sanitized by copy editors—reached public consumption. A combinationof new technology, new skills [anyone canprint a magazine or publish a blog (Weblog)], changing public attitudes to correct-ness, and economics of publication (mostcopy editors are now freelance) have led to“destandardization.” Written language nowmuch more closely reflects the norms ofspeech. Dictionaries include the latest slangexpressions because they appear in newspa-pers. Is e-mail best thought of as spokenlanguage written down? Or as a new kind ofinformal writing?

A Multilingual FutureAny look into the future must en-tertain the idea that soon the entireworld will speak English. Manybelieve English will become theworld language to the exclusion ofall others. But this idea, which firsttook root in the 19th century, ispast its sell-by date. English willindeed play a crucial role in shap-ing the new world linguistic order,but its major impact will be in cre-ating new generations of bilingualand multilingual speakers acrossthe world.

The growth of Spanish in theUnited States can be understoodas part of a much wider global

trend toward bilingualism. In Europe, a waveof English has spread from North to South(6). In Sweden, Denmark, and Netherlands,nearly 80% of the population now claim flu-ency in the language (Fig. 2); France is a stateof transition; in Italy, Spain, Greece, andPortugal, learning English is now big busi-ness. Indeed, students and employees may beassumed to speak English—it is regarded as abasic skill taught in elementary school along-side computer skills. Employers in parts ofAsia are already looking beyond English—inthe next decade, the new “must-learn” lan-guage is likely to be Mandarin.

The spread of English and other majorlanguages beyond their traditional territorieshas eroded the idea that “one country, onelanguage” is the norm. In the new worldorder, most people will speak more than onelanguage and will switch between languagesfor routine tasks. Monolingual English speak-ers may find it difficult to fully participate ina multilingual society. We also must thinkdifferently about what it means to speak alanguage, or to learn and teach it. The expec-tation that someone should always aspire tonative speaker competence when learning aforeign language is under challenge, as is thenotion of “native speaker” itself.

Future of GrammarTheoretical perspectives in linguistics willshift to reflect these trends. In the 19thcentury, scholarly study of language fo-cused on vocabulary—particularly its his-torical subdiscipline known as “etymolo-gy”—and phonetics, which provided a new,laboratory-based dimension. During the20th century, scholars became more inter-ested in grammar— especially the problemsrelated to word order and syntax that alanguage like English presented (the heavi-ly inflected classical languages of Latin andGreek had allowed grammar to remain abranch of word study).

When Noam Chomsky published hisgroundbreaking book on Syntactic Structuresin 1957 (7), syntax became regarded as thecentral problem in linguistic description. Butin the future, we may come to appreciate howfar the Chomskyan approach has led linguistsdown a blind alley. Over the last half-century,theories of syntax have lost touch with lan-guage as spoken by people in the real world,and have retreated into abstract studies ofuniversal features of human cognition.

Linguists keen to develop theories appli-cable to real-world problems of our age—such as in education, machine translation,information retrieval, national security, andeven forensic law—have begun to exploit“data mining” techniques made possible bythe power of modern computers. They havescrutinized patterns of language in huge col-lections of real-world texts and conversa-tions—hundreds of millions of words at atime. Such corpus-based analysis alreadysuggests an answer to something that haspuzzled grammarians for hundreds of years:No one has ever successfully produced acomprehensive and accurate grammar of anylanguage. In the words of the early 20th-century anthropological linguist, Edward Sa-

pir, “all grammars leak” (8).Some emerging text-based gram-mars suggest that such an attemptis unnecessary—there need be nomore endless arguments over tax-onomies of subordinate clause. Itseems that much of what we haveexpected of grammars can be bet-ter explained by focusing onwords and the complex way inwhich they keep each other’scompany. Some words tend to beused as the subject rather thanobject of a clause, others maytypically appear in prepositionalphrases. The human brain is ableto store experience of how wordspattern, what kinds of text theyappear in, what kinds of rhetori-cal structure will follow them.

Fig. 2. Percentage of European Union populations claiming that theyspeak English (6).

Table 1. Estimates of numbers of nativespeakers globally in 1995 for the top 10

languages (1).

LanguageNo. of native

speakers (millions)

1. Chinese 11132. English 3723. Hindi/Urdu 3164. Spanish 3045. Arabic 2016. Portuguese 1657. Russian 1558. Bengali 1259. Japanese 12310. German 102

Table 2. Estimates of numbers of nativespeakers globally aged 15 to 24 in 2050 (1).

LanguageNo. of native

speakers globally(millions)

1. Chinese 166.02. Hindi/Urdu 73.73. Arabic 72.24. English 65.05. Spanish 62.86. Portuguese 32.57. Bengali 31.68. Russian 14.89. Japanese 11.310. Malay 10.5

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This is the new science of collocation andcolligation that illuminates how texts work.

Future of TextsCorpus linguists will have to work fast tokeep up with the changing nature of texts. Astexts become shorter, more fragmentary, andmultimodal (using pictures, color, sound, ki-netics as well as words), so strategies ofinterpretation and ways of reading willchange.

A struggle is brewing too between au-thor and reader, the producer and consumerof texts, which has many of the dimen-sions—political, economic, social, techno-logical—that characterize postmodernity.On the one hand, multimodal texts needmore attention by designers and editors tomarshal disparate forms of information intoa coherent whole. But against them is amovement—at times fundamentalist in fer-vor—that demands free access to “con-tent,” and argues that publishers, editors,and designers are part of a capitalist con-spiracy to add cost and control access toknowledge. Digital texts may mark thedeath of design—which will become a mat-

ter of a reader’s preference setting. Buttechnology also gives publishers new free-dom to reversion intellectual property, tomake it look different to different catego-ries of reader, and to sell text by the para-graph. The linguistic resources required toconstruct and interpret longer, unifiedtexts—which collectively form institution-alized genres—may be lost in all but spe-cialized domains such as the scientific ar-ticle. Readers will be left to make sense offragmentary, often contradictory informa-tion dispersed across different channels.

Will the Future Understand Us?When Thomas Sebeok, an American specialistin semiotics, was asked in the 1980s to advise ona method of communicating the whereabouts ofdangerous repositories of radioactive waste togenerations 10,000 years hence, he concludedthat there was no secure means of transmittingsuch knowledge over 300 generations. Instead,he recommended putting in place a relay systemwhich ensured that “as the information begins todecay, it should be updated” and argued that anymessages written in English should be designedfor only three generations ahead—that is, 100

years (9). This may seem a short horizon—if alinguist were faced now with a typical text fromthe 22nd century, he or she would be unlikely toconclude that the language has radically changedin its core vocabulary or grammar. But we mightnot be able to make much sense of it.

References1. D. Graddol, The Future of English? (British Council,

London, 1997).2. D. Graddol, in English in a Changing World, D. Grad-

dol, U. Meinhof, Eds. AILA, Milton Keynes, 1999), pp.57–68.

3. United Nations Environment Programme, Press Re-lease, February 2001. Also at www.unep.org/Documents/Default.asp?DocumentID�192&ArticleID�2765.

4. D. Crystal, Cambridge Encyclopedia of the EnglishLanguage (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, ed. 2,2003).

5. D. Graddol, D. Leith, in English: History, Diversity andChange, D. Graddol, D. Leith, J. Swann, Eds. (Rout-ledge, London, 1994), pp. 136–166.

6. European Commission, Standard Eurobarometer 52,http://europa.eu.int/comm/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb52/eb52_en.htm (2000).

7. N. Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (Mouton, TheHague, 1957).

8. E. Sapir, Language (Harcourt, Brace & World, NewYork, 1921), p. 39.

9. T. A. Sebeok, in On Signs, M. Blonsky, Ed. (Blackwell,Oxford, 1985), pp. 448–466.

V I E W P O I N T

Software and the Future ofProgramming Languages

Alfred V. Aho

Although software is the key enabler of the global information infrastructure, theamount and extent of software in use in the world today are not widely understood, norare the programming languages and paradigms that have been used to create thesoftware. The vast size of the embedded base of existing software and the increasingcosts of software maintenance, poor security, and limited functionality are posingsignificant challenges for the software R&D community.

We are living in a rapidly evolving informationage. Computers, networks, and information per-vade modern society. Some of the componentsare visible: Virtually every office and home isequipped with information devices such as per-sonal computers (PCs), printers, and networkconnection devices. An increasing fraction of thepopulation is using the Internet for tasks as var-ied as e-mail, messaging, searching for informa-tion, entertainment, and electronic shopping. Theamount of information on the Internet is mea-sured in exabytes.

Most of the infrastructure supporting the in-formation age, however, is not evident. Today’sinformation appliances such as TVs, organizers,

and phones contain microprocessors and otherforms of embedded computer systems. Telecom-munications and Internet access systems are allcontrolled by networked computers. Wirelessnetworks with voice and data capabilities arefound the world over.

The information age has been thrust uponsociety, and everyone is being affected by thenew technology. The information infrastructureis creating new opportunities for improving allaspects of life from childhood to old age. But thetechnology is also creating new challenges, es-pecially in areas such as the security and privacyof information systems.

The Unappreciated Importance ofSoftwareFew people appreciate the importance ofsoftware— until it breaks! The amount of

software used by governments, companies,educational institutions, and peoplethroughout the world is staggering. An in-dividual system, such as a PC operatingsystem, can consist of many tens of mil-lions of lines of code. If we assume thatthere are 5 million programmers world-wide, each producing 5000 lines of newsoftware a year (the industry average), thena conservative estimate is that the world isalready using hundreds of billions of linesof software to conduct its affairs. Assumingthat it costs somewhere between $10 and$100 to produce a line of working software,we see that the worldwide investment insoftware is in the trillions of dollars. Asoftware system requiring tens of millionsof lines of code would cost hundreds ofmillions of dollars to develop from scratch.The high cost of new software developmentis one of the principal drivers of the cre-ation of open-source software, whose sys-tem development is essentially done forfree by volunteer software specialiststhroughout the world. But open-sourcesoftware has created another market oppor-

Department of Computer Science, Columbia Univer-sity, New York, NY 10027, USA. E-mail: aho@cs.columbia.edu

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