THE WORLD ended today. (I'm writing this before the end of the workday, so I could be wrong.) If it did end: congratulations on surviving! What language do you speak? What about your comrades? Are there any traces of written language left? If you're still speaking and reading standard English, give it some time. The futurists think you or your children will be using language differently soon enough.

For instance, David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas, had some ideas of what English might look like in a few hundred years. The last of the novel's six stories takes place in a post-apocalyptic Hawaii, "after the Fall". The chapter begins:

Old Georgie's path an' mine crossed more times'n I'm comfy mem'ryin', an' after I'm died, no sayin' what that fangy devil won't try an' do to me ... so gimme some mutton an' I'll tell you 'bout our first meetin'. A fat joocesome slice, nay, none o' your burnt wafery off'rin's...

Many writers have played around with word spellings in order to evoke dialects. Mark Twain wrote in this sort of "eye dialect", Charles Dickens did it too, and Mr Mitchell did it for his new English. Halle Berry and Tom Hanks brought Cloud Atlas's future-Hawaiian-speak to life in the October film version of the novel. Their dialogue was less dialectal than the written form. This was probably for listeners who didn't have the luxury to reread the text to figure out what Mr Hanks's fellow tribesmen were getting at. Mr Mitchell's words read earthy, sounding more old than new. 

Of course, Mr Hanks's character lives in a village. Ms Berry's character, who traveled to the islands on a sleek ship, apparently speaks in standard American English. She code-switches to the Hawaiian dialect when she arrives. Another Cloud Atlas story takes place in a futuristic Korea, but the actors in those scenes speak standard English with a hint of a Korean accent. Mr Mitchell uses standard English in those chapters, too.

So what's going on? Science fiction movies almost all use dialogue that we'd recognise: see Blade Runner or the Star Wars films, for example. Surely this is partly out of convenience. English-speaking audiences are loath to watch a subtitled film. Reading an unknown language isn't an option. Inventing a language is a tough job, too. Perhaps we can imagine that the filmmakers and authors are translating the dialogue just as they'd show Germans speaking English with a German accent. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skirted the issue by inventing the Babel Fish, which conveniently slurps through the ear canal to translate any language. George Orwell's 1984 and Ayn Rand's Anthem used 20th-century English with changes only in vocabulary, not grammar or (apparently) pronunciation.

These books and movies are entertaining but don't get us closer to imagining a future language. English changed dramatically over the last thousand years. It's changed over the last twenty years, too. Our language today has ancestors and cousins that are nearly unintelligible to lay English-speakers. It makes sense to imagine that 2200's English or 3000's English will look strange to us as well—if English survives. After all, if there's an apocalypse today, which languages will remain? English is spoken by hundreds of millions, but it's not the most spoken first language. It's the most far-flung, but an apocalyptic event might not be geographically choosy. (Was it, dear survivor?) Written English has complicated the language's evolution. It's sped up changes, especially through the Internet. It has expanded its global reach. But it has also frozen some grammar rules, spellings, and writing styles. In a multicultural new world, English might creolise. A particular nonstandard accent could become a prestige form. If a literate English-speaking population has access to English writing after an apocalypse, maybe the language wouldn't change so much. More likely, a group of stressed survivors would have more pressing matters to attend to than dangling participles.

So much depends on the events that await English tomorrow or two hundred years from now. This is no surprise: English is what it is today because of a thousand quirks of history, not any intelligent process. For science fiction writers, predicting tomorrow's English is easier because they've also laid out the events that shape its development. In some books, like 1984 and Anthem, language change plays an important role. In most other books and movies, language is just a bother to be ignored. But that's not so bad. Even the most skilled linguists can only speculate about change. But perhaps you, my post-apocalyptic reader, have a special insight into tomorrow's English. What's it like, then?