Return to Babel

There has been some talk in the peak oil community about leaving some kind of legacy to post-peak societies

… Languages change, and they never change more swiftly and more completely than during times of collapse. Of course, this is partly because writing obscures linguistic changes, even in the eyes of those who undergo them. The French language you may have learned at school if you had some time to waste is so different from what is effectively spoken in the street of Paris that it could be considered a completely different tongue, yet French people hardly notice it and continue to think that their language marks plural with a -s suffix while it does it through a combination of liaison and verb and article agreement.

That is not the whole story, however, and French is probably an extreme case. Most of the time, linguistic change tend to be delayed by the influence of ruling class dialect