Language is a continuously developing and evolving modus communiqué. The future may hold a language totally alien to us. Technology has imparted new dimensions to language. This article attempts to vivify languages of the future and their scientific scope.

From cravings on caves to an organized library of words. The journey of language has witnessed many milestones. The goal was clear, methods were different and impacts were impetuous. The idea of communicating thoughts finally ties itself up with the evolution and growth of language.

Every human language known so far has gone through certain stages of development to achieve their "fully developed" status. No matter how many methods of communication will emerge in the future; the ideas and the concept of linguistics are still holding a strong ground. They have proved and established themselves as de facto modus communiqué. The imprints left on humans by language are so high that we cannot even think of any species thriving without it. The modularity, adaptability and flexibility have made it possible to mould language according the time and place it is spoken in. Every period or era of human development thus had its own vivid language, which set the period apart from the rest. Thus, the development of any society gets reflected in the development and progress of its language, which changes the way people communicate.

It would be interesting to find out the shape of our language when revolutionary technologies will be realized, or rather when the convergence of technologies will become a necessity.

Natural language processing is already starting to span across virtually every field of AI - knowledge representation, machine learning, perception, reasoning - and the ability to use language is required for all kinds of intelligent behavior. Before AI researchers tried to make computers understand natural language, it was thought to be a relatively straightforward matter. Children seemed to do it so effortlessly, and parsing was taught in school as an algorithmic task.

However, after years of work, computers still cannot understand natural language as well as young children. Not only are the rules of natural language itself unknown - we don't understand the complex cognitive process involved in using them. It also turns out that a huge amount of knowledge is used in understanding even simple sentences. Knowledge of the subject matter of a sentence is clearly required. The meaning of a sentence depends not only on the things it describes, but also in both aspects of its causality: what caused it to be said and what result is intended by saying it. In other words, the meaning of a sentence depends not only on the meaning of a sentence itself, but on who says it and when, where, how, why, and to whom it is said.

In the process of discovering the difficulties, AI has greatly elucidated the nature of language understanding during the past 25 years. Now, we know more about the technical aspects of our languages than ever before and we are in the process of further simplifying the process by unlocking the secrets of language understanding. Developing trends in the computer languages and operating systems have shown that computer programming is rapidly becoming a natural language matter, far away from the hidden technological aspects of the implementing hardware involved. Our future programming languages may not even resemble today's programming languages and may better be called as ‘natural version of technical languages’.

It seems that at that time it would be impossible to isolate technical language from human language. Chances are big that today’s languages will probably become obsolete, or become so integrated with the developments that it would be difficult to separate technology from language and vice versa. This will force our future languages to be more technically driven towards natural orientation.

And there are reasons to believe that our present language will live long enough to support our future generations. Communication is already becoming more and more technical with the use and introduction of hand held devices. The future methods of communication will have more and better interaction programmed. Think about the shape of communication fifty years back when telephone services were just getting popular. The present communication devices use more technology than ever and their usage (and usablility) is bound to increase exponentially in the coming future, as more technologies will become available. Different technologies will have to communicate with each other and that’s where the convergence has to play a vital role. As more and more data conversion is required, preference will be given to those languages, which are simpler to understand and process, easier to communicate, ultra compact in order to save bandwidth and most importantly require less stages to get converted into the desired format and to isolate the user from the hassles of how such services are implemented. Convergence of technologies has made it possible to use many value added services under the press of a button, and our future languages will explore this facility to their maximum advantage. Next generation languages are already showing their presence in the market. The most striking feature about them is they are quickly becoming popular and replacing normal languages in a systematic manner. This is one positive and healthy sign for future of languages.

Despite the shared use of the word "language," programming languages are quite different from natural languages such as English. Their purpose is not to communicate values, culture, emotions, feelings, political views, or arguments to a human being, or to coordinate action with another person. Rather, their central purpose is to encode the steps to be performed by a machine. Thus, whereas human languages are necessarily laden with ambiguity because words and phrases have real-world meanings which are subject to interpretation, computer languages are designed to be precise so that the functions will be performed correctly. Universities long ago recognized the fundamental difference between human languages and computer languages, disallowing use of the latter to satisfy language requirements.

Furthermore, the process of compiling source code into object code is not the same as translating between natural languages such as English and French. One reason is that the result is intended for a machine, not a human being. Another is that the process is very different. The compiler assigns memory locations and registers in the central processing unit to instructions and data objects. It determines the precise order for directing computations in the CPU and the movement of data between the CPU and primary memory. It inserts instructions into the code to make use of routines already on the computer, for example, to compute a square root or display results on the screen. Most compilers also optimize the object code in order to speed up processing. Thus, any analogy between programming languages and human languages is extremely weak, except that both can convey information.

There are more questions to answer, more testing beds on which these languages have to prove their claim to qualify as the surviving language of the future. Few of the criterias have taken directly from the established languages and some other have been added keeping in eye the shape of the technologies and society in future. We can roughly figure out the form of futuristic languages:

• 1. The language will have to be very compact to save bandwidth and time.
• 2. The language will have to be flexible and friendly.
• 3. It should be simple to learn and communicate.
• 4. It should be independent of medium of communication and therefore can be used over variety of electronics devices and modes.
• 5. It should relate itself with the majority of natural languages around the globe.

The universal appeal that any such language will have on society will determine its comparative strengths and weaknesses. As devices are getting more mobile and focus is on mobility, time is an important factor. Even if the bandwidth of the future lies in the gigabyte or terrabyte range, considerable time will be used in conveying and converting the message to the desired location and format. The question of bandwidth requirement is not very relevant here. There are technologies in making that will provide us many times more bandwidth than available today. The most time-consuming would be the process of looking for languages or methods, which will convey the same message, but are easier to use. Conversely, if the message takes less time to type and send - left alone transmission time - a longer message can be delivered and transmitted in the same time slot. This is where the compactness of language plays a crucial role: it should be ultra compact and yet be able to convey the same or more information in less time. Most of the present languages fail on this ground: they are informative but less compact.

A second aspect for such a language would be the general appeal. This would constitute all points of consideration relevant for masses. How flexible it is to suite the individual taste? How easy is it to understand and to communicate? With the trends going on in this direction it seems that our future language will be simple enough for even a child to understand and learn in much less time. Physical devices will not only act as a transmitting medium, but will also be ‘intelligent enough’ to simplify the communication process. You may not even have to worry about which language the other side understands. A single translation chip in your phone will do the translation. On these grounds, the present languages definitely have a strong hold, but if we consider the popularity that chat lingos have achieved in a very short period, this advantage will also be short lived.

Chat lingos have shown what future holds for languages. You can communicate a lot of information through those small symbols like smiley etc. even if you don’t understand a word of any language. Just follow the expression, select the corresponding figure, simple click and that’s it. It was never too simple to express yourselves. There are special acronyms to give a different approach to the message. Good news is that they are not only easier to handle, they are already in use as SMS messaging the world over.

Chat lingos have utilized one of the important communication methods known to human kind since its inception on this planet- the language of expression, precise, concise and does not depends on which language the other side is using, saving the cost for extra technology for translation. This is one of the main reasons behind their success and wide popularity. Our future languages would be somewhat like them with a very rich variety of library and freedom for creativity. You can create your own personalized smiley and it will appeal to every other person in a similar manner. A smiley requires virtually no words to convey its message- it expresses them. You can also design something really personal for someone special that will give him a sense of privacy and uniqueness. Such "Designer Languages" are what the future holds for us- flexible, user defined, user friendly and yet powerful enough to convey more than you can think off. They will not only be backward compatible (convertible to earlier version of languages) but will also act as a launch pad for other futuristic languages. In the future, more information will be transmitted with a smaller amount of words. Blending it with convergent technologies will develop a language that will probably connect every physical device and will appeal to the heart and soul of advanced connected society.

Such languages will not emerge miraculously and also will not be entirely different from our present day languages. They will explore and utilize plus points of many languages before finally evolving as vigorous. If we enter into chat rooms, we can find such languages in their infancy state. Chat lingoes may not qualify themselves as English or any other human languages known till date, but still they are appealing to the masses like any other languages known so far. Simply coding to another form will transform that language into another one, making it completely coded and isolated from its parent language. In this way, the two languages will face the generation gap syndrome whereby simply coding it in a different manner gives rise to an alienated language. How could anyone take any responsibility that those coded verses will carry the same meaning forever? We are slowly moving ourselves in the direction where such languages gaps are bound to exist.

As if SMS or Chat rooms were not enough, MMS are fast becoming popular. People are using it for sending photo messages using their mobile phones. Think about the implications- a single photo can transmit messages inside it (this was one of the main fear of the US Authorities that terrorists can use photographs to transmit encrypted messages within it). This would make the communication more secular and yet simple, efficient and cheaper. As devices will get smarter, the language will become slimmer and simpler. With more and more devices joining the group, scopes of such languages are bound to grow. It is really surprising to discover that languages are not only getting slimmer and easier but they also started showing signs of inherited security. Think of the well-established chat lingos and they are much easier to decode and encrypt to transmit different kind of messages to different people at the same time. Adding any other encryption technique will simply enhance the security level and ensures that even if many can receive the message, the meaning will be conveyed to only the desired one. Their ultra portability will simply help them to transmit them on wider range of instruments with equal ease. The future language will concentrate more on relying the meaning rather than number of words and therefore will use less memory to store, less bandwidth and less time for communicating and still qualify themselves as languages and not just as an encrypted message.

Chat lingos, SMS messages and MMS messages are just the beginning to the never-ending quest for excellence. In the future our regular language may have to face the threat of being obsolete on the grounds generally dominated by technical languages. Testing grounds will be different, as present languages will have to prove themselves to be technically mature. The sign of relief for them is that this is not going to happen in another 20-30 years, and this period is long enough for any language to enrich itself with newer concepts and lingos. It would be very difficult to predict the future of language because rapidly evolving technologies and their continuous convergence with each other might change the flow. It would therefore be wise enough to accept the fact they we may probably will not understand even a single words of our future generations. You probably may not need any language to convey your message in the future, the idea of brain to brain communication once realized, will enable us to communicate our ideas and thoughts much more clearly and efficiently without saying a word. But there are stages to be cleared before we can reach up to that level.

The future will witness the rise and fall of many languages as the technology progresses. This would mean a definite language gap between our future and us if we keep ourselves absent for so long. The English of the future will not be English and every present language will suffer the same fate. In the future, you might have to run for a dictionary to see whether what you have learned was really language or not. And therefore many of our present languages might have to face the label of being obsolete. The computer languages of the future will be more like any other natural languages and natural languages will be more technically driven and mechanical. The languages of future will encompass every dimensions of human expression - not just the particular linguist context but also the whole realm of human experience.

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