Future language

Flash forward about thirty or forty years from now. Several generations of children have gotten used to using augmented reality gesture to talk with each other.

Because these kids spent time with these interfaces before they were seven, they have incorporated into their everyday natural language the ability to draw shapes in the air, create virtual objects through gesture, and navigate a space that mixes the physical with the virtual.

As much research has shown, natural language is actually created by little kids, including natural languages with a strong visual component.

Most grown-ups never quite master this new kind of natural language. They can usually muddle through, using some kind of pidgin as a serviceable approximation, although they make all kinds of grammatical errors that the kids find funny.

But a generation or two after that, those kids will have grown up, and nearly everyone will be a native speaker of our future language.

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