The pre-imperial human settlers who colonized the galaxy during the Dark Age of Technology initially spoke a variety of Low Gothic. During the Age of Strife, however, their colonies were cut off from Old Earth for millennia. As a result, the standard version of Low Gothic spoken on Old Earth/Holy Terra and the many local varieties of Low Gothic spoken in the various colonies were entirely disconnected for a very extensive amount of time. Nonetheless, when imperial crusade fleets reestablished contact with these colonies at the time of the Great Crusade, it was frequently still possible for settlers and crusade fleets to communicate with each other, even without any sophisticated technological support. This suggests that, in many colonies, the local variety of Low Gothic had remained surprisingly stable over time. Our talk discusses how realistic this scenario is based on current linguistic (e.g. Fox, Grant, & Wright, 2023) and psycholinguistic (e.g. Pickering & Garrod, 2017; Jacob, Ilen, & Engemann, 2025) theoretical accounts of grammatical change. In addition, we compare the fictional scenario in the Horus Heresy literature with existing instances of grammatical language change in real life, such as the linguistic development of varieties of German spoken in the German diaspora (e.g. Namibian German; Schulte, 2025). Two key findings from this line of research are that instances of grammatical language change (a) are largely restricted to linguistic situations characterized by extensive inter-language contact, and (b) typically require an open society in which linguistic innovations are tolerated. Based on these findings, we conclude that the living conditions of Terran settler communities represent ideal conditions for Low Gothic to remain stable.
Author bios
Dr Gunnar Jacob is an experimental psycholinguist from the University of Mannheim. His core research interests are the cognitive mechanisms of morphological and syntactic processing in bilingual speakers and the psycholinguistic foundations of contact-induced grammatical language change.
Britta Schulte is PhD candidate in Linguistics from the Technische Universität Berlin. In her research, she combines experimental linguistics and sociolinguistics to investigate how local varieties of a language, , such as German spoken in Namibia, change in settings characterized by extensive language contact.
