Speculation concerning the future direction of linguistic evolution, despite its obvious pitfalls, has a long tradition, not to mention attraction, in linguistics. In the French domain, one need only think of Pulgram (1967) or of various works by Ashby concerning « Future French » (1974, 1977), both of whom reflect on ideas present in French scholarship dating from the early decades of this century (e.g. Meillet, 1921, 1936; Vendryes, 1923). Recent work in typology, showing apparently orderly progression from one language state to another, has buttressed speculative efforts, as have many of the results of sociolinguistics, where clear trends in age or social profiles often allow one to infer directionality and even end result on the basis of ongoing change.
Linguistic evolution driven by network heterogeneity and the Turing mechanism
