Linguists doubted that, having arrived at the space colony of the Earth, astronauts would be able to make out the "local dialect" of people born on an interstellar ship.
Let's imagine for a second that the ambitious plans of scientists came true, and a detachment of colonists went on a spaceship to Titan, the largest satellite of Saturn, to make it a "suburb" of the Earth. "Fasten your seat belts," announces the voice of the robot. "Our journey will take about 10 generations of astronauts." What will happen on board and abandoned planet during this time? How will the language of space tourists and people remaining on Earth change?
Light from Saturn to Earth takes from one to one and a half hours, depending on the position of the planets in their orbits. One day the moment will come when it will be impractical to maintain constant communication with astronauts, messages will become less and less frequent. Eventually, they will take on a formal character. For decades, the ship will forget about earthly problems: a burnt out toaster, coronavirus, financial crises and political strife. The words associated with these problems will also be forgotten. The social and technical difficulties of the astronauts will be different, and they will talk about the actual things.
The ideas of the colonists' grandchildren and great-grandchildren about the concepts we are used to will become vague, and without special training, they will completely disappear. During this time, new grammatical norms will appear on Earth. Masculine nouns will turn into neuter or feminine nouns. There will be new devices, wardrobe items, at CERN they will open another hundred or two elementary particles that will need to be named somehow. Will the colonists born on the ship understand each other and the people who flew to Titan a hundred years after them?
Linguistic scientists from the University of Kansas and the University of Southern Illinois, in a work published in Acta Futura, insist that linguists, or at least astronauts with advanced knowledge of the language, be taken with them on a long-distance space expedition.
The idea may seem rather strange, but the researchers make very convincing arguments in defense of their argument. Among others, scientists point to the following observation. Increasingly, some speakers end their statements with increasing intonation. The young phenomenon is only 40 years old, but it has already received a name - uptalk. Non-native speakers may perceive such sentences as interrogative and ignore the true message, such as being polite.
The problem of deaf astronauts is described separately in the work. Genetic studies have shown that people born to interstellar travel may not have the ability to hear. Therefore, in addition to knowledge in metalinguistics, the authors of the new work recommend that astronauts understand sign language.