Words change over time. Anyone who has read a King James Bible, from 1611, can see that "thee" and "thou" has since been replaced with "you". This isn't about loan words, adopted from other languages, but about English words that have changed.
Words don't change suddenly. New words tend to start as slang. There was probably a time when saying "you" was considered as slang. Since there is no reason to think that words have stopped changing, we might look at slang to see what the words of the future might be.
There might be a factor that we could call "word drift". When writing was valuable and expensive, such as before the widespread use of the printing press and inexpensive paper, words would be shorter for efficiency. When writing became far less expensive it might be expected that words would "drift" in length, and become longer.
But now we are in an era where signs and billboards are everywhere. This is moving us back toward making words shorter, for efficiency. There is also the factor that virtually everyone is texting, making shorter words more efficient.
We can see this on signs all around us.
"Quick" is becoming "Kwik".
"Through" is becoming "Thru".
"Doughnut" is becoming "Donut".
"Value" is becoming "Valu".
"Information" is becoming "Info".
"Photo" or "picture" is becoming "pic".
But the most prominent change is in speech, rather than writing. I have written here before how "yes" is changing into "yep", and it is time to recognize it as a word. This week, for the first time, I called a business and the person on the phone said "yep".
Let's welcome "yep" to the dictionary because "yes" is fading into history.
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