The effect of television and the Internet has clearly not been to level dialectal differences in general, but it has allowed speakers of already very diverse dialects of English to maintain enough exposure to understand each other with perhaps less effort than prior ages would have required. We may even see — a few hundred years from now, at most — Britons and Americans, for example, speaking what for all intents and purposes will be separate languages, but they will retain a high degree of intercomprehension simply due to media connectivity. The Anglic language family will be to this millenium what the Romance languages were to the last.