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

I didn’t even realize the repeat of the High German Consonant Shift 😶 great observation!

@@watchyourlanguage3870 the interesting thing is you mirrored it! Syllable initially, the HGCS shifted p to pf/f, t to ts, and left k as k, while your preconstruction fricativizes k and leaves p alone

@@watchyourlanguage3870 it sounded like a russian accent to me

More like Dutch with all the snorting

@@weirdlanguageguy It's worth noting that while it didnt happen in standard high german, some bavarian/swiss dialects did shift /k/ to /kx/ word-initially which completes the affricatization of all three voiceless (aspirated) stops. Actually, it's thought that the affricatization of /k/ used to be more widespread but was reverted due to low german influence.

It reminded me a tad bit of Lex Fridman

To me it kinda sounds like a Russian speaker who learned English in Ireland, then moved to the US for a while, and is drunk.

Gave me serious Pavel Chekov "Nukly-ear wessels" vibes lol

It's bloody awful whatever it's supposed to be. Sounds like there's about a gram of white powder involved...

I'm a russian myself, and I'd say it's the exact opposite. It sounds like American trying to speak with Russian accent

Full circle

more like german since dutch was unaffected by the high german consonant shift and many consonant shifts here resemble the high german ones

oopsie poopsie! nederlander aalredy de maast goofie laanguage in de woorld! caant wet for beecoom anoder laaving stok!

Obviously. The big things that create a new dialect are Physical Isolation and Imprinting. Which is how American English broke-off with British English in the first place. But if Social Media was alive back then, I bet the Colonists wouldn't have lost their British accent. If they can't hear the accent, it has no influence on them.

@@eksbocks9438 you may be surprised to learn that american english has actually gained more new accents since radio/tv. the effects of media on accents of a population have been scientifically shown to be minimal if at all people confuse an individual persons accent change with a populations re: anecdotal evidence

I've personally noticed that I "don't find weird" (I'm a layman, gimme a break) recorded speech from the 1920s, but a generation earlier than that (back to the first recordings), there's a noticeable shift with both British and American English.

It makes me wonder if that will slow down changes in our language, or speed them up. For one thing, I think it will definitely make changes happen across a wider area. We might even see separate English speaking regions of the world become more similar over time rather than drift apart. I've even found myself picking up a few British terms and phrases without even realizing it at first, just because of RU-vid.

@@TheGreenKnight500 preach bruv 😂

Maybe that's historically how the lack of distinction between singular and plural happened, but the remedies for it that people come up with are all* about creating a new distinct plural form. *i haven't done any research, no idea if it's always a new plural form, but i haven't seen anything else

It has both but lacks the distinction between 2nd person singular and plural.

@@iamasalad9080 It _did_ distinguish between the two, until people decided it didn't need to, and now they're realizing that dropping the second person singular might not have been a great idea.

@@angeldude101 Just a minor correction: it was not a singular/plural distinction. 'Thou' was used as the INFORMAL second person singular and 'you' was used otherwise. Even to begin with, there was no singular/plural distinction in formal speech.

I think that might just be the direction those things like to go, after all 'y'all' is halfway to also being a singular itself.

Really, Aussie here and it made sense to me, maybe because we practice listening to us and uk accents. How many tv/movie actors from uk or aus/nz are able to play us speaking roles but Americans are almost all bad at Strine.

I'm an American that regularly watches videos from Brits. I could understand it well enough. I see this being potentially similar to Scots. It might be a bit hard to understand at first, but there's a lot to be understood if you train your ear a bit.

Segregation provides the ground for accent change. Now that we are all connected anywhere in the world. Our accent is pretty much synchronized. I doubt there will be much change in the future. This will probably be the last accent we speak, before we communicate via neural signals and migrate to machines.

@@MalachiCo0 bro 💀I'm English Caribbean and I understand most of you people just fine it's all just English accents

Also since the advent of the internet, I think British English will gradually become more similar to American English, not more different. We already see this with the deaths of many American accents in the past 30 years.

Sorta like the Belter creole in The Expanse

I've been saying this for awhile. There has to be a spanglish movement... I hear it every single day, in California. Even among ppl that aren't native English speakers, they absolutely use English or Englishfied Spanish words.

Idk why but there's something so cringe when i hear spanglish I guess my exposure to both languages has just been in their completely separated forms that when i hear spanglish it irks me. No offense to you I just find it weird that a normal linguistic process would bother me that much

@@jgraham6267 Or Cityspeak in Blade Runner.

How did people talk then? All I know is the artificial Transatlantic accent.

@@tompeled6193 just look at how old people talk. Listen to your grandparents or somm

@@tompeled6193 Cinderella 1950 version

@@papaicebreakerii8180 They're Israeli and don't sound like Americans when they speak English.

@@tompeled6193 oh. Old people in America basically talked the same but with more defined accents and different slang. I’m guessing OP’s got some money tho since he’s complaining about people speaking “proper”

To be fair, I think it comes off as slurred mostly due to the uncanny valley phenomenon and secondly because it is very hard to speak completely, but slightly, differently than you normally do in a particular and consistent way.

I feel like the final version has too many centralised, schwaey vowels, while having a lack of low vowels (theres one, the LOT vowel, but it could really benefit from at least leaving PRICE down there as well) this probably accounts for a lot of the "slurriness"

Yeah I kind of agree.

Jamaican English, Cockney, Australian English, just to name a few, these all sound quite slurred to me. It's a matter of perception. I probably sound slurred to speakers of those dialects.

@@swagmund_freud6669 I’m not sure what he meant by “slurred” most the time people use that to refer to so called “uneducated” or “lazy” speech. That might not be what he meant though.

I'm french and this does not sound even remotely like french, like at all, this is more like german than anything

Sounds like a Swedish person, kind of American but "off". Also reminds me of old people from the midwest/rocky mountains. More Scandinavian than the British/Irish south.

It sounds a bit similar to Dutch in my opinion.

Year 2077: Wait it is all Russian?

sounds nothing like russian or french

Spanish Spanish would be more interesting tbh, seeing how it would evolve from Old Spanish to Future Spanish

To be fair, Spanish has some impact as the " vulgar " language to curse people out in where I live. I find it sounds sassy and colorful, but the way it is used is to curse people here. Also the cursing vocabulary is being adopted into Southern English.

Peppa Pig and Harry Potter are responsible for causing a 21st century vowel shift.

It’s already kind of happening with internet slang. You can tell what kind of political spaces someone frequents if they use words like “based”, “kek”, “cuck”, etc

Two creol languages make even more creol one, wow

I'm actually quite curious to see this in real life.

if there was a creole, it would be something documented because language change in texas has been studied for over a century, like when german was still commonly spoken. its like not noticing louisiana creole youre probably hearing code switching, actually called spanglish, which is well documented anywhere there is a large latino population

I wonder if it sounds similar to Spanglish spoken in L.A.

i think this is what chicano english is. it’s not spanglish or “learner english”, but the influence spanish has on the way one speaks english, even in 1st- or 2nd-gen americans who dont know much/any spanish. not every bilingual who speaks like this is mexican diaspora so i feel the name should be different, but being one i kinda speak this way and live in a highly latino-populated area in chicagoland. it’s found a lot here and then texas + cali (which the drastic location difference is super interesting to me). im not super into linguistics but i also rarely see talk about it, altho it does have a wikipedia page and a pretty good slideshare presentation that shows up as one of the first google results.

"Talking about a civilization collapse" Yes the year is 2022. Global economic collapse imminent. Time to undust my future linguistics book. Don't want to sound out of place.

@@dralel1381 Global economic collapse => no more TikTok => intelligible speech for everybody

My thoughts immediately, plus the regular consumption of American media by British, and British media by Americans.

Colonization of the solar system may have interesting effects. Even if the light speed time lag is only tens of minutes, that puts a barrier up on communication which might result in new languages splitting off. Colonizing other stars would be even more likely to produce new languages, since it will take years to exchange information.

Will they continue to argue over words like "pants", "toilet", and "bathroom"? 😆 These three words take up way too much bandwidth in online discussions between Brits and North Americans.

@@Xubuntu47 Or the word Garage

@@Xubuntu47 I'd be inclined to think that having dialectal differences will eventually just become normalised. or ya know, we might end up with them being adopted by each other and becoming synonyms.

From Chicagoland and I never use Y'all nor hear anyone use it outside of AAVE. I use You Guys

same, except i never said y’all until i joined the service

Correct that an unintelligible divergence will not happen with the british. British english will actually die out and become more American, while american english will take on british English just a little bit.

I also don't see a divergence of American English and British English happening, for the exact reason you mentioned. Because we communicate so much between continents in real time and the fact that we travel back and forth a lot too, it's pretty safe to say that mutual intelligbility between the two varieties is here to stay.

As someone from the south, I rarely ever use "you all" we always just say "yall". Nobody says it with a super stereotypical accent however, its just another normal word.

Are young Dutch also influenced culturally by immigrants to be more conservative in such a very officially liberal country? I mean as in attitudes to LGBT, gender roles and such domestic things

@@seronymus that’s a very interesting question. I don’t live there, so I can’t say for certain. I would think that if the verbiage can influence them, then so too could other cultural aspects. We all know that Muslim immigrants can be less than appreciative of gay/queer culture, which had otherwise become accepted in Western Europe. I believe personally, that queer culture is targeted towards native Europeans, for a variety of reasons, and is largely disregarded when it comes to the migrants. The leadership in Europe is hilariously conflicted between accommodating alternative lifestyles, and accommodating third world immigrants. I don’t know how it plays out, but they must benefit from the dissonance/chaos at some level.

@@Belenus3080 As a young German, I found that among our youth, there actually seems to be a greater emphasis on the concept of honour in social interaction than there was a while ago, and swearing on God/generally swearing oaths has also become more common, both likely due to Muslim influence.

@Belenus3080 As a young Canadian, I’m seeing a general shift towards more moderate policies. There is a general distaste for anything that rocks the boat to much or is too extreme. A lot of my peers see the wave of political polarization and decided to fight back by being more conciliatory towards differing viewpoints than I’ve noticed my parents generation is. Canada is essentially a nation of immigrants to being with, so it’s hard to say if immigration is a factor, as that trend seems to be common across most people I know, regardless of race. I just think it’s quite interesting that the youth are generally seen as society shakers but generally I’ve seen that people my age are actually more interested in practicing a live and let live attitude. Nobody goes out of their way to fight someone about their beliefs such as an anti-vaxxer, religious missionary, or extreme leftist might. The whole gambit are generally just seen as morons.

@@ianrau6373 I also have noticed a bit from both sides, a distaste for extremism. I have liberal and conservative friends who say “I don’t understand why we can’t just get along and have civil conversations”. And then there’s the very loud subset of extremists who say you shouldn’t be friends with people who share different views, or even that you should be violent towards people who say the wrong words, like the whole “punch a nazi” thing that was trending a couple years ago. Of course “nazi” is just a catch all for someone who disagrees with you. I think a silent majority of people have realized that civility and social cohesion is more important than righteousness in daily life.

Yes its more like american accent becomes the official accent of international english language, because its already much more dominant, than the british accent, that might die out, because young people are not that keen to speaking english like old angry british woman who drinks her tea and complains about her neighbors and the weather.

@@jout738 or american and british will mix kinda. i think a lot of non native speakers mix british and american a lot

You’re damn right lol

Which does mean that if you somehow you were transported to the future you'd be able to read the text.

And "no one" might merge into "noone" as evident from your usage

@@jouiboui that's the one thing I hate the most about teaching spelling to people new to the language: merging 2 words into 1. If I saw a word "noone" as a beginner I wouldn't think "no"-"one" i'd think "noon" with a silent -e. This also happens with words like "doing", which should rhyme with boing and oink, but don't.

@@jouiboui oh, that might be the case ) Though I wouldn't use me as an example since English is neither my native language nor my main foreign one

Yeah seriously, I had to slowdown the playback speed just to understand this guy.

Agreed, especially if you're not reading the text while listening.

reminds me of Guillermo and William too

Welsh also had w > gw initially, whence Welsh gwerth for English worth (both from PIE *wertos)

@@metro9640 indeed

This seems super random, but I guess that's just how language works.

@@xXJ4FARGAMERXx language is very random sometimes

Yeah I’m seeing British people use aave from time to time so it might happen

@@blizyon30fps86 eh, not exactly. British people may use some words from AAVE, just like many Americans do, but actual AAVE is more than just a bunch of words. In fact, If I'm not wrong most black people in Britain speak a slang that is different from the African American one and is actually closer to Jamaican

@@orion3433 british black people’s slang is waaay different from american black people’s

Exactly if our accents were going to start drifting apart it would have happened a while ago.

Deep South won’t. Maybe the coastlines will

It kind of makes sense because Canada has their own TV stations and Radio. Just like Britain. So, it's easier for them to insulate their dialect. And I think with the negative reputation that American Media gets sometimes: They're probably a bit more comfortable sticking to what they're already familiar with.

@@eksbocks9438 Enh speaking as a Canadian, I think you're discounting just how much American media still influences us. Most Canadians I know, especially young Canadians in urban areas, speak very similarly to Americans with a few exceptions. I expect that SCE will become more like SAE as time goes on. A lot of features of SCE are already less common among the youth such as the /j/ after an alveolar consonant. I imagine where the differences will be most pronounced are with French influence and influence from immigrant and refugee languages.

@@Sky-pg8jm Good point. I've only noticed slight vocal differences from Canadians. But the way they speak is similar to Americans. Quebec is one of those places that confuses me. I know someone people there only know French. While others are bilingual with English. But it would make sense that being monolingual in a different language would have less influence on someone. For obvious reasons.

The difference probably is purely to the prevalence of AAVE in American English as opposed to Canadian English, especially with younger people

​@@cossaizy6309AAVE is highly prominent in canada

Yeah something like [ç]. This could lead to he merging with she

phonetically speaking, that's usually what it's considered as, since many speakers of English have a palatal fricative when /h/ comes before /j/. It generally gets written as /hj/ for simplicity though which I think can cause confusion like this

@@spcxplrr yes, that's why I specifically made note of "/h/ before /j/" My intent was pointing out that English already has a palatal fricative, which can then be used to justify an expanded change, like what you're talking about.

Well that's how it feels regionally where Appalachian and Southern are spoken here vs. People around 2005 and above. Where if they are raised in the country we can understand each other when spoken with no problems, but the vocabulary shift shows up when spoken in the city vs. the suburbs. Where one has pitch and intonation to make it easier to understand, and the speed is faster as the suburbs and mountains are defined by speed. Thanks to that Irish influence. Where if speak slower it sounds Southern, but faster than it becomes a complete train wreck to people that are younger or grammatical pronouns ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. So one side goes with 'em and 'ey, but the other is them and they. Cognates of eachother, but... How they are used completely falls apart on what objects use it and how it is used. He and She are mutual though, but the difference it's also applied to admired inanimate objects and marks as possessive, along side animals as well. IT to distance, but use he/she are " we're okay with pets ". Just different systems. Disposable plastic silverware has MULTIPLE NAMES. I use " Plasticware ", but heard redudancies like " plastic silverware", cutlery ". Why not a very GERMANIC and LITERAL name for something lesser than most utensils?

We're kind of going under a cultural distinguish in our Southern English where in the cities, they got "political correctness " and well. Having Southern English + Appalachian as the more everyday person speech... Bible Belt and the rest of the USA we'll overtime have dramatically different sound systems as in this video. The ya'll here is FLAT which is weird to me, as in person that's not how ya'll sounds like at all. It's much further in the back of the mouth and sounds high then low then high . U as in UBER , A as in ALL. So I can relate. The Northern City Vowel; shift is hard to understand which would be a similar analogue to Portuegese sound to Spanish ( Castilian ) speakers. Similar vocabulary, but completely different intonations and sounds. Though the grammar side for us is slowly creeping. As Southern adds a'lot ( instead of plain lots ) of those articles, but makes a relaxed schwa back in the mouth. It's going -> It's a'goin'. Mainly the pronouns and pronoun usage have different contexts entirely.

I think it will lead to AAVE becoming way more influential than even this video predicts and it will likely make language/dialect much more unified as we go on. Especially between British English and American English

Maybe just for now, the internet and establishment media may not even last that long. Things like Canadian diphthong raising or the Northern Cities Vowel Shift are big and recent sound changes that are almost exclusive to that region, yet my Texan English region doesn't seem to be influenced by those features. I don't have Canadian raising because Trailer Park Boys is my favorite show

BBC basically half-assimilated, if not decimated so many local UK dialects over the 20th century. Many tones and terms are now fading memories if not lost. American media too. However, in light of uncertain political and societal developments, this could change.

@@zanziboi i dont understand, what do you think will happen to the internet and all the media? how will they disappear?

I have stumbled into a culture I cannot comprehend.

Oh this is very true. Personally, I haven't heard a single person under... 40 or so use past participle "run" or "come" for example, opting for "ran" and "came" instead which reflects the simple past tense. I probably only do the prescribed words because I looked them up when I was younger lmao.

I expected to see this mentioned in the video. I'm certain it'll become the norm at some point.

I've never heard "hadn't went" or "had was". I occasionally say "have went" , but it's just a mistake when I'm not thinking. Where are you that this is common? I can see "spoken" losing the "n"; that's probably a general tendency of English, like "If it ain't broke, don't fix it. One thing I usually do is to say "laid" and "have laid" intransitively. I got into a comment dispute with second-language English speakers who said their teacher and grammar book says the past participle is "has lain". I said that sounds Elizabethan. So it may be that native speakers use the incorrect "laid" / "has laid" while second-language speakers use the more correct "lay" / "has lain". :)

@@sluggo206 hmm...the simple past and past participle of "lay" are both "laid". But the past participle of the verb "lie" is indeed "lain" (and simple past is "lay"). But you're right, most native speakers just confuse both into "lay".

As a young person, I agree I tend to use the simple past tense more than the participle, but I still very often will use them interchangeably. I find that I tend to be more inclined to use them when I'm trying to be formal, less inflammatory, or if the sentence just sounds awkward to me without one. I use the past participle of "do" very often; I tend to say "Have you done it?" over "Did you do it?". For responding to such a question, if the answer is no I'll almost always say "I haven't done it" or "I haven't gotten to it" though when I actually have done (this being an example of feeling awkward without a past participle) whatever task was asked if me I'm more inclined to respond in the simple past tense with "I did it". I think perhaps the past participle for common verbs like "do" and "go" will remain while for more specific verbs such as "speak" it will fade.

I’m not entirely sure what you mean by that, but I do have a video planned soon that may explain that principle

@@watchyourlanguage3870 It's four predictable sound changes pretty much. I'm pasting this from Wikipedia: 1. The final vowel in a word may be omitted. 2. Voiceless sounds, often between vowels, become voiced. 3. Phonetic stops become fricatives. 4. Consonants become voiceless at the end of words.

@@Youcifer Oh, I was talking about something else. Those are very true tho

He’s one of my favorite RU-vidrs and a big inspiration behind my own channel… I don’t try to copy him by any means, I like doing my own style, but I suppose his influence comes out!

I love Netherlands

Same for some reason.

Maar hebben we geen hockeymeisjes...toch

Why don't you just move here?

maybe it's freedom and capitalism

I wonder if accents could become more a class thing than a national thing. Increased connectivity will make rich people all have a sort of classy “American/British, highly educated, with a fruity twist that suggests the ability to speak 5 other languages” thing going on from all travelling and intermingling and educating their kids in boarding schools wherever in the world they want. Meanwhile the lower classes will have higher regional variance due to lower mobility but the cultural influences will become so much more universal that the core of the accent will become pretty universal. At the end of the day, take an American rapper and a British rapper and listen to their vernacular. It may seem different but it’s essentially the same thing, with a different flavour, “yo whaddup bro,” and “yo whatsdoin bruv” are basically the same idea, expressed a bit differently. As an Aussie, I have a mix of both influences in my life and have definitely picked up bits of American and bits of British slang. It will all slowly mould together. I know this is a little off the topic of sound changes, but those will all be in there too. Obviously as those influences clash and meld, the sounds will work themselves out

No, only the west coast is counter clockwise, the inland north is clockwise. For example: Inland north block: "black" West coast black: "block"

@@edwardmiessner6502 /æ/ isn't a particular good vowel to use since that one isn't treated the same as other front vowels in inland northern English. /æ/ is diphthongizing and the nucleus rising, as is common in all forms of North American English (though to varying degrees) but it's doing so in all contexts instead of just before nasals. However the other front vowels are lowering in the opposite direction of /æ/, which is much more of a counter clock wise direction. Really to be honest clock wise and counter clock wise aren't the best descriptions of vowels change in the first place, but the only region that can be said to have a clockwise change, accepting that term, is Southern English.

I think German past tense and future tense will sooner or later be replaced by perfect tense and present tense, respectively. So "Gestern fuhr ich nach Berlin" will become "Gestern bin ich nach Berlin gefahren" and "Morgen werde ich nach Berlin fahren" will become "Morgen fahre ich nach Berlin". The future tense will probably still be used for uncertain events.

best comment i’ve seen yet

It hasn't changed faster than other languages though? Also, larger collective speaking communities tend to change slower over time.

@@primalaspie english definetely changed faster than say serbocroatian

Subscribed btw! I like the stuff ur doin on ur channel :)

I feel like most vowels are being centralized slowly aswell.

_wait sylhetis say fani???_

I’m guessing he thought that in English this would be unlikely because it would encroach on /f/. I could see that issue being avoided if we came up with a scenario in which /f/ shifts as a result too, which would probably also cause /h/ to shift, which the video proposes anyway.

Granted, I’m much more of a language hobbyist than I am a linguist, but in regard to your first point: a change I’ve noticed more and more recently with the rise in accessibility of the internet is a subsequent fall in an adherence to standardized spelling. Think text slang: got to go -> gtg - gotta go, -ing -> -in, even more abstract examples like tone indicators such as /j or /s all serve to counteract your argument for how quickly (or not) changes may propagate throughout the general American dialect. Standardized spelling is becoming less and less standard as print or, more accurately, text media is becoming more and more accessible for the general public to produce than it ever has been in the history of humanity. I’m not too sure how much this will truly affect language evolution on the long run, but I definitely think it’s worth consideration. P.S. apologies if this doesn’t make much sense I’ve been awake far longer than I should be.

You make an excellent point, and I had considered that as well. It certainly will play a major role. I was referring more to the smoothening effects of education in spelling and pronunciation for children in primary school, and how this often dampens regional accents to a certain extent and slows the accumulation of sound shifts. It doesn’t completely stop them though, and as you point out the internet provides a medium where such changes can be found. These would still thus remain dialects or more likely: sociolects, with the retention of a “formal” general language dialect which would (though change slowly) still retain many of the features of its present form far into the future. I do agree though that we will almost certainly see the proliferation of non-standard dialects of American English, and potentially rapidly for the reasons you stated.

Overimportance given to blacks, underimportance given to Latinos. If current trends persist English might not even be used at all.

@@connorperrett9559 I agree with your first claim but not the second. Whether we like it or not, and I actually do not like it, English is the lingua franca of the world. Even people who are not native English speakers use English to communicate with one another. I think what will be the most common thing is that the world will have a developed English and the political English which everyone learns to speak when in other countries which do not speak English natively. The internet is also almost entirely archived in English and the most expansive knowledge bases we have are in English. I myself am not a fan of English but whether you like it or not it's staying.

Agreed, I thought it was rather odd choice to describe AAVE as a "prestige" dialect that would go on to influence Americana for the next 500+ years. What is regarded as having prestige is something that has always been changing-the English once considered Latin a prestige language, then at some point French. If American English speakers regard AAVE as prestigious in accordance with pop culture as it is presented _at this particular moment in time,_ then that's one thing, but I find it a bit of a stretch to propose that it will always be regarded as such. That's like saying hip-hop will always be the dominant genre of music just because it happens to be so at this current point in time.

@@thethrashyone Exactly. I imagine some contractions/phrases/words will appear in common modern english, but I have a feeling this will be unique to the USA. Also, things like "finna" are not going to over shadow "gonna" considering that more people use it and it pertains closer meaning the original etc. Also it is more likely that "ask" will turn into something like "ash" or "ass" (I know a little funny lol) like we saw in German and Swedish, not "ask", considering that according to a recent study the whole "sh" sound before plosives (t, k, d, p, b, etc) that happened to German is starting to happen to English all over the place.

I suppose that IT in "it's raining" and "LET'S" can become one particle "TS" By the way i think THEM will mutate into "em", so "let's get them" 'll become "Ts get em" which possibly will glue together as "tsgetem" and it's raining can become "tsrainin'" But i'm not sure :)

@@rytpgod5911 Or it could go the other way: Let's becoming Les then simply le. Your example could be a mouthful, though, so legitem (or ligitm) could be how it happens too. It can be unpredictable, like how I'm going to somehow turned into Imma.

Most of America in Halo times (~2552) : *drops a few letters* The South in Halo times: **Boomhauer**

Yeah well, linguistic change rarely happen because people are aware of them and excited about them. It's more like a trend. Currently it's very popular to appear "regional" so there's a heavy focus on ways to identify to what groups people belong to. Probably won't last more than a few generations.

My Western dialect is the opposite: it merges cot-caught-father-bother, so all four sound the same. It has most of the other mergers too, so it has the smallest number of vowels and lots of homonyms. (The main one it doesn't have is pin-pen.) So the question is, when are the homonyms too many? That's in the eye of the beholder, and I can't answer it because to me they ARE all the same,. just like see vs sea vs C. It doesn't cause many problems in understanding because context clarifies it -- but it sure causes a lot of spelling errors. English itself is a vowel-heavy language, and dialects differ primarily in their vowels. So it's such a royal mess it's amazing that speaker can understand other dialects at all. And we can also understand Shakespeare and Chaucer to some extent, which is even more amazing. I'd assume that your dialect will eventually merge cot-caught, but who knows. Shifts like that happen when children start losing the distinction, and then in the next generation it's gone. The majority of surrounding dialects have the merger, so that would reinforce it, plus people moving to other areas. So I'd assume cot-caught will eventually merge.

@@sluggo206 cot-caught-father-bother mary-marry-merry and pin-pen, BUT I've recovered /o/ due to vocalizing syllabic L. Still leaves me with 9 monophthongs and 5 diphthongs. My question is what does he do with the syllabics?

@@sluggo206 There is a separate many other distinctions of my particular form of speech, even differing from my parents. Whereas my parents say the following; orange, forehead, Florida as; ah-range, far-head, Flarida, whereas I say all of those as; orange, forehead, and Florida, all with /o/ as opposed to /a/, this particular dialectalization happened synchronically back in Proto-Balto-Slavic as well to note, and this is known based on resulting cognates between those two groups; of words that at one point in history pivoted between /o/ and /a/ on the part of its speakers. There are other mergers that are partial in my dialect, Mary and merry for example, which I try to distinguish, but often falling short, really what's happening is the a in a word like can is merging with the lax e sound such as in pet. As well, there is the conflation of the fricative in virgin, sounding identical to the would-be affricate in version, yet, is now synchronically confused between being an affricate and being a fricative, at least within unfocused speech. In fact, while writing this, I had to double check my terms, because aloud I said virgin and version as the same. I am also finding myself adding epenthetic nasals in certain specific words, which is really annoying to deal with, but could stick in the future, the key word in mind with this shift is the word comet becoming to sound as though it were the word comment. Additionally, as well, in my own speech, I often confuse the usages of is and are in very specific contexts, even to the point where in learning on, for example; Duolingo, when writing in English I've been marked wrong, yet, that's simply how I speak day-to-day, it's something that I do not often come to notice in my speech. There are some specific changes that are intentional in my speech, such that I almost never try to use third person plurals in place of an unknown third person singular, in my speech I will default to an assumptive he, or more often I say one, or oneself, or I will use the word who if applicable too. I've also intentionally brought back the usage of whom, and am trying also to apply thou/thee/thine in my speech, but more over I do use ye as an object pronoun. "Who did this? To whom is this? Whomst/Whom's is this?"

@@imrukiitoaoffire1908 The g in virgin is affricative like judge or chip. The s in version is fricative like montage or ship. I've never thought of virgin and vision as sounding similar. But maybe you can answer something else. I've always heard and pronounced soft th as a voiceless fricative (thing), and hard th as a voiced affricative (this). But all the references I've seen say both are fricative. So are the references wrong, or am I the only one who says it like that, or do some dialects do it and others don't? I've always pronounced hard th by flicking my tongue off the alveolar ridge, and soft th by holding it close to the ridge. Doesn't everybody? Or do I pronounce it differently than everybody else and somehow hear it wrong?

@@sluggo206 So, correction on my part if I had written vision, I meant version and virgin, I probably mixed up writing the two, vi(rgin) and (vi)sion. As for the your question of dental fricatives, what you're highlighting is a specific change which was historically found as change in both the shifts of Proto-Germanic and Norse to modern German and the Scandinavian languages, whereby the th shifted to a voiced th (could surmised it as dh), which then shifted into a plosive /d/. In fact, the change of fricatives to plosives is something found rather commonly in the Germanic languages, and specifically it is found historically in German, which is actually how German developed the word kein as a negator, and in fact, in Gaelic and Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages equivalent negations starting with velars exist, but German is unique in that it turned that voiceless velar fricative into a voiceless velar plosive. So; th > dh > d /h/ or kh /x/ > /k/

ax? cause it's its definitely gonna be ax

whatever you call it when cousin becomes "cousint" probably happening. just some observations i've had.