History of English

Here's an interesting post about the history of the English language.  The argument is that English comes from Scandinavian languages and thus many words are interlinked with German.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2012/12/language-families

I thought it interesting how the word store has many meanings in several languages.  For example in Polish, sklep is where items are kept for safekeeping and also where items are sold.  The safekeeping word is a bit dated and I learned it though my grandfather who told me it's where they kept food outside the house for storage (usually underground where it was cool).

English has the same with store (as in a file on a hard disk) and store (where you sell things).  German too with lager.

End of Dialects

After reading about how Apple's speech recognition is having problems, I was thinking that the because we don't have a uniform dialect or even language among humas to interact with technology, the technology is having problems understanding our commands.  One thing that I foresee is that people will start uniforming their speech to be compatible with computer speech recognition software.  Could this mean an end to speech dialects?

Computer have changes out lives a lot in the past 20 years.  Look at hand writing, typography and language.  50 years ago there were many more languages and regional dialects.  If someone needed to learn English it was because they were interested in British/American culture, not to interact with someone from Brazil.

You can see it also in typography, where older signs and other print media had interesting fonts.  Now days almost everything is in Helvetica, old German Fraktur script is pretty much dead and only left to WWII themes.

So I wonder if it will be the same with regional dialects in America's south or parts of the UK.  Will our speek all become hegemonized to a standard that computers will be happy with?