Wait a sec, syntacticians can find jobs?

1) At some point I recall learning that the single most commonly borrowed word in the world is kitab, the Arabic word for book and the reason was assumed to be because ancient Arab cultures were prodigious traders. I think this discussion came up when my linguistics field methods class studying Sherpa discovered that the Sherpa word for book was, of course, kitab (or some cognate variation).

2) One of my first linguistics professors posed the following thought experiment: imagine a group of people speaking mutually intelligible dialects of the same language become stranded on an island for decades. Over time, would their language patterns tend to conform to a single dialect, or would they diverge?

My novice answer was: they would conform. But he suggested they would diverge, probably forming cliques around a small number of competing dialects. This is for social reasons as much as anything.

I think you are right that commerce and language will continue to influence each other, but I’m not convinced that the mere existence of good machine translation will allow diversity in language to flourish. Imagine a world where fluent machine translation exists for all languages into all languages. There will still be homogenizing pressures like social stigma, class, race, etc.

In this world, computational linguists and syntacticians will be out of work, but socio-linguists will live like kings, haha.