Academics will tell you that language not only evolves, but at an accelerated pace in smaller groups. They should know, look to any arcane discipline for multi-syllabic excess. Or just read on with blogs and podcasting and whatever else we invent and adopt tomorrow.
This presents a problem for linguists and search engineers. Estonia is a small country of 1.5 million residents who have preserved their language despite English, Russian and Finnish. Language changes so fast that my wife has to make a point of explicitly asking her friends about new cool words. Now imagine engineering a translation engine in this context. The market for the product is relatively small, uh, by definition. There are no authoritative sources for what is new. What you define can be an artifact of history by the time its enshrined in code.
Now there is Old Estonian, in which many epic tales were written like Kalev, and New Estonian, the formal modern language. They barely resemble each other, an evidence of change. At some point there needs to be a release numbering system for small languages 2.0.
Smaller languages don't have the benefit of Google Translate and Bablefish services that are bringing the world together faster than ever. Some in Estonia have been working on this problem, first by measuring and identifying the speed of language. The approach is to anonymously mine streams of SMS and other text traffic, isolate and measure new language. In order to fund this core technology, some initial development was supported by PR and advertising firms, of similar value to new startup that track meme propogation.
Markets. Conversations. 'Natch.
Globalization was supposed to gradually meld all languages and English was to rule the world. This is partially true with the English-centric Internet. Especially as the market of language flocks to liquidity, as Google and others are commoditizing language. But the countervailing force is our desire in groups of all kinds to create our own language for sake of efficiency and expression.
Because we make markets in words these days there is an opportunity for public/private/non-profit sector collaboration to aid global understanding while supporting native languages. Major Search companies have made an effort to localize which is directly in their market interest. But I happen to believe that if you simply give greater relevance to native language search results you are not doing the world or user a favor. It very well be that a blog post in Esperanto is exactly what you are looking for, today you will never know, and a long tail advertiser would be happy to help you along your way.
But while those in the long tail of language invent their own at increasing pace, the top 20% homogenizes. Foundations and eelemosynary individuals (philanthropic) could contribute to the development of, say, Google Translate between Estonian and English, but the fundraising cost and IP issues may never allow this to happen.
So for now, its the domain of smaller more nimble and perhaps self interested social entrepreneurs to do it themselves. They will invent their own language, which you will surely be speaking one day.
