The Sietch

The unification of the West into one (American-led) hegemony, as we foresee, will no doubt have linguistic consequences. Besides the influx of lots of foreign vocabulary, periods of hegemonic consolidation tend to involve deliberate standardisations (think of an equivalent to the Académie française). And then there's the issue of deliberate evocations of traditional forms. At least the "upper class" speech and writing may be expected to deliberately evoke classicism.

Yeah, I wondered if the French Academy would come up. Not ruling out such a body coming into existence, per se, though I suppose my own take on this (as you're familiar with) would call for standardization that comes about via an "industry standard" of sorts, rather than a top-down government fiat.

I'm also not expecting the upper classes and regular people to interact much, either, though I don't suppose they'd still be mutually intelligible, despite different dialects and vocabulary? Bit of a crude analogy here, but if so, I assume it'd look something like the Average Joe today talking to one of the Founding Fathers, both of whom could understand what the other's saying with effort and clarification of what certain words mean.

Since the current period is extremely and unusually egalitarian, we may expect things to swing back to stratification hereafter. When we consider that even now, there are neighbourhoods in e.g. the Netherlands where people speak something that I would not recognise as Dutch... well, then we can easily imagine what things will be like when social strata diverge to a meaningfully greater extent!