this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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This is what I love about any movie/tv show/book/novel/short story about the future .... it's all spoken in the same language that we all understand now.
But if we could listen to regular everyday English spoken in North America 100 years ago, it would sound a bit off and unusual. Listen to English as it was spoken in England 300 years ago and it would probably sound very strange and unsual, go back to 500 years ago and we would probably have a hard time understanding.
The same thing is going to happen in the future (IF there is any kind of future and we don't blow ourselves up or kill ourselves off in some unusual, creative and complicated way) ... historians will listen to recordings of how we talk today and think of us in the same way we think about someone from 1800. Go even far into the future about 500 years and someone from 2526 will probably not be able to understand anything we're saying unless they use a translator of some kind. Those people 500 years from now will probably look back us like we're making grunting sounds like some cave people from prehistory.
Here ya go...
How far back in time can you understand English. A fairly long but facinating read.
That is interesting ... but that's the written language. Up until about 1950, literacy was only reserved for those who could actually afford a decent education. A hundred years ago, it was only a very small percentage of the population who could actually read or write. The vast majority of speakers spoke only a common language that was particular to their location and history ... so the English they spoke was probably very different than what was being written by a nobleman from their time period.
Another fascinating read is just basic Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain ... one of the reasons his writing became so famous was the fact that he wrote his characters speaking in every day language that people spoke ... not a polished aristocratic uptight proper English that only the most wealthiest and properly educated people could appreciate.
The excerpts in that blog post are interesting but they would only represent the language of the most wealthiest people of their particular time. If you spoke and listened to a common worker from their same time period, you'd probably hear an entirely different language being spoken .... and the difference would be even more pronounced the further back in time you went.
Jeez, what country are you talking about with that level of literacy up until 1950? India?
Most global historic statistics have fairly accurate information for first world countries but seldom have any for developing, third world countries or rural populations.
I'm Canadian, Indigenous Canadian and my parents were born in the wilderness in the 1940s when starvation was still a thing when they were children. They got an education but one that centered around beating the ever loving shit out of you for being brown than in teaching them how to read or write. Even though they lived in a first world country, their generation in Indigenous Canada was more or less illiterate. And that was the style at the time ... you counted only the people that were worth counting and you didn't count those you didn't care about (which was usually 90% of the rest of the world).
So in the 1950s, when the US, UK and French average literacy rate was about 70% to 80%, they only represented less than 10% of the global population ... most of the world was unrecorded, badly recorded or just ignored, the global average at the time was about 20% (or probably less)
To play devil's advocate since sound recording modern English has only gotten more succinct. Also everyone speaks their own variation of English they know. Besides actors
390 years ago i doubt you'd understanf anything tbh
Sure you could. That's basically Shakespeare. Reading it is a little tough but you can make it out. Hearing it is probably just a matter of getting used to a different accent. But it's modern English.
Did you really intend to write 390 years, or is 9 a typo like the end of understanf?