Vocabulary in terms of slang and so forth will change, but I wonder how media will preserve the tone, accent, etc. that we speak in. The Transatlantic accent may be dead, but the General American newscaster English is trapped in amber.
This is a cool piece. I've been thinking a lot about how I communicate in person and in text form, and how it changes based on situation, e.g. when I am trying to be incredibly informal or quick in text, I default to all lowercase and will always truncate words/use acronyms/use single letter spellings (u for example).<p>It's been fun watching how we communicate in the age of social media and instantaneous communication.
Interesting premise, but be careful with the linear thinking here. As a counter example, Icelandic didn't change as much as English in the past 200 years. For English, one would probably need to look even further back in time than 200 years. Change in language use is somewhat related to the number and diversity of speakers and the number and diversity of english speakers didn't grow linearly in the past 200 years and probably won't grow linearly in the next 200 years.
I never thought of "also me:" as being a linguistic innovation, but it totally is! I'm now wondering how many of the current "memes" are going to translate into linguistic innovations decades from now.<p>Now that I think of it, mOcKiNg tExT is tied to a specific Spongebob image/meme--I wonder if that will affect how prevalent mocking text will be in the future, or if the meme will accompany mocking text and both will be part of linguistics.
200 years is a loooooooong time. Would expect even more bizarre shifts in digital communications, like attached emotional imprints from automatic brain scans or something.