link -- Yes and there is a lot of dialect and regionalisms and pronunciation scorn and snobbery by the “proper” speakers of a tongue. The Dutch in the north of their nation roll their eyes at the “Southerners in their small country. My 98 yr old German Mother-in-Law is a high German speaker who finds Bavarian and Austrian German to be barely tolerable let alone intelligible. The Northern Italians feel the same way about the Southern Italian dialects and accents. Even in the US people use a Southern accent to imply someone is not too bright or educated… when that is unjustified.
England for many years as most of you know had French speaking nobility and a hodge-podge of Anglo-Saxon-Viking-Celtic languages for the peasants and it took centuries for it all to blend into proto modern English… and even by the time of Radio and Television in the UK, people with regional accents were never heard unless it was a comedy or something set in Cockney London or needed a Midlands, Scots of one sort or another etc. accent. It is only in the past 2 or 3 decades that finally people with non posh accents were finally featured when before they would have to affect a “Queen’s English” accent in order to find work involving speaking.
Language commonality as state policy put tried to put most European nations into a linguistic straitjacket, suppressing local variations as much as they could and that has been largely successful in general. France has been quite successful in suppressing its dialects and in particular ones that were not related to French, like the Celtic language of Brittany and in the Basque border regions with Spain. German speaking border regions also felt the Francophone pressure. And much like the British suppressing the Irish language in Ireland even traditional names in some areas were banned. Spain worked hard to get rid of the Basque language as well as the native Catalan tongue. But in all of these examples the languages proved hard to stamp out and they persist.
And I should note that the Indian constitution recognizes at least 50 different languages and dialects and that is not complete either. China is often said to be mainly Mandarin speaking but the South still speaks Cantonese and under the national language a very large number of local languages still survive. The Tibetan and Xinjiang languages have been targeted and the main weapon against them is just flooding those regions with native Mandarin settlers.
Languages are living things and they are not static but constantly evolving. It may be that vowel drift will slow down, spelling and pronunciation may stay more stable for longer with the internet and video communications. But accents and slang keep things mixed and changing. So who knows? Recordings from the earliest days of that technology and the very first talkies reveal that our accents have changed a lot even in a lifetime. When I was young and visited relatives in Southern California there was a definite accent in that time and place but it has largely gone. Extreme Southern accents persist but through much of the South it seems to be more moderated and blended into a softer Southern version of a general US accent.
But then again everywhere in the world individuals speak differently depending on who they are with… back in their home town, at work, in a mixed group. Black English is a perfect example of this. Being more homey or work sounding depending on circumstances. So as new terms and tinges in language bubble up and then fade, some of that stays on longer and in the end persist enough to become part of the main flow of it. So even if language evolution slows down because of modern communications unifying our discourse into a larger entity that is meta stable… in time it will still change. Language cannot avoid that and there will be those who do not like newer iterations and those who scorn the speech of older generations and as ever people in on area will feel that THEIR version of the language is the “correct” one.
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