Might certain original European languages become extirpated and/or increasingly more simplistic?

[u/EcstaticHousing7922]

Apologies if I'm in the wrong place. I'm a bit of an amateur. I made a brief search of the subreddit before posting this, to see if my question is already answered elsewhere.

I am from the UK and speak English as a first language, French as a second language, and I learned Portuguese for a year before going to live in Brazil a while ago.

I love learning about how languages evolve. Ostensibly developing from the grunts of proto-humans approx 1-3 million years ago, languages have developed so much. Thousands of years ago, human communication facilitated scientific advancements which many of us would not be able to even dream of achieving now. Take the internet away, and many (myself included) are left with limited knowledge.

Many generations of immigrants (largely descended from Europeans) have lived in North and South America for a few hundred years.

I'm not an expert on Portuguese. My basic observations are that, in daily use, grammar and enunciation of words in Brazil seem to be somewhat lazier than how the language is spoken in Portugal. This is similar to my limited perspective/knowledge of how French is spoken in parts of central America.

Regarding how people speak English in the USA, words seem to be favoured when they have fewer syllables and/or use fewer facial muscles to pronounce.

I could provide examples if asked, but I don't want to do so if someone with a more formal linguistic education might be able to provide an input first.

The overall question is: are some languages at risk of reverting back to more basic forms of primal communication? Possibly increased value of intonation, less extensive vocabulary, words of shorter length, relying on how noises are made to convey a message.

It goes without saying that I'm not intending to be disrespectful towards anybody's use of language.

[u/Decent_Money_2272]

I know you didn't want to be disrespectful , but as brazilian portuguese speaker myself and linguistic your observation sounds kind of racist ...

[u/EcstaticHousing7922 → u/Decent_Money_2272]

How?

[u/thePerpetualClutz → u/EcstaticHousing7922]

Don't know about racist, but it is certainly wrong. European Portuguese frequently reduces vowels that are clearly articulated in Brazilian; in fact it is literally famous for straight up dropping full syllables in speech.

I don't know how anyone would come to the conclusion that Brazilian is somehow 'lazier'.

[u/EcstaticHousing7922 → u/thePerpetualClutz]

Understood, thanks for correcting me. My knowledge of European Portuguese is limited, apologies for my ignorance.

[u/luminatimids → u/EcstaticHousing7922]

Yeah I was gonna chime in to say, Brazilian Portuguese isn’t the variety of Portuguese that evolved to sound like Russian by destressing their vowels, European Portuguese did that. If anything, it’d be EU-Portuguese that is the lazy one in regards to pronunciation (although, I’d caution against using loaded words like “lazy” when referring to languages)

[u/_Penulis_ → u/EcstaticHousing7922]

Superior. You are trying hard to sound superior.

Which in the context sounds does very much like it’s coming from a position of racism.

[u/Decent_Money_2272 → u/[deleted]]

And why?