”Th” sound will vanish from English in 50 years time, because of multiculturalism, linguists say
The presence of multiculturalism in London, which is considered the most linguistically influential city in the English-speaking world, will bring about significant changes in the English language over the next 50 years, according to a report by The Sounds of The Future, which was produced from a study that analyzed recordings from the last 50 years as well as social media language, which uses a lot of abbreviations and emoticons.
The report predicts that the “th” sound, which so many foreigners struggle to pronounce, will disappear from the language spoken in the city and that will influence the way English is spoken in other places as well. Instead of “th”, also called the voiced dental nonsibliant fricative, people will pronounce an “f”, people will pronounce “f”, “d”, or “v”. In words like “mother”, “thin” or “thick”, this will translate into “muvver”, ”fin” and “fick”.
The phenomenon is already beginning to take place as Estuary English (a hybrid of Cockney) is being replaced by what is known as “Multicultural London English”, which is influenced by the English-speaking Caribbean, West African ans Asian communities living in London.
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Other changes which are likely to occur in 50 years include the habit of “yod dropping” in which the “u” sound is replaced with an “oo”. Words like “duke” become “dook”, “news” becomes “nooze” and “beauty” changes to “booty”.
Another change will be consonant “smushing”, where two sounds collapse together and words like “wed” and “red” will be indistinguishable.
Also, the “l” at the end of words like “Paul”, “paw” and “pool” will be dropped so all sound the same and “text” will lose the final “t” to become “tex”. In fact, the glottal stop pronunciation of “t” will be the default pronunciation.
Dr Dominic Watt, a sociolinguistics expert from the University of York has said to the Telegraph that “The major changes in the way we speak over the next 50 years will involve a simplification of the sound structure of words, they’ll become shorter probably. By looking at how English has changed over the last 50 years we can identify patterns that seem to repeat. British accents seem to be less based on class these days.”
“Languages also change when they come into contact with one another. English has borrowed thousands of words from other languages: mainly French, Latin and Greek, but there are ‘loan words’ from dozens of other languages in the mix.”
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