Genitive, LOL and other language developments

If you were to ask a freshly enrolled child what "Bandsalat" is, they probably wouldn't know what it is. If you had asked in a first-form class in the year 2000 what Bandsalat is, probably every child could have said: that's when the cassette recorder mangles the cassette and you then have to wind it back up again with a pen. Well – the fact that this word no longer appears often in everyday use is more down to the fact that the CD replaced the cassette (before digital downloads and music streaming services took over the field) than to linguistic changes. Yet these are closely linked to the transformation of society. Because just as in fashion, in music and really in all areas of life, there are also trends and developments in language.
These changes usually happen rather gradually and are less noticeable than if suddenly all teenagers were running around in platform shoes. Nevertheless, they are ubiquitous – and probably everyone has already heard of a linguistic change that is currently taking place: The dative is the death of the genitive.
The second case – which you learn about in primary school by asking Whose? – is hardly used anymore in spoken language. Instead of saying "That is the house of my father" we prefer to use the construction: "The house belongs to my father." But why is that?
People speak in the way they find pleasing to their ears and in most cases it goes a little faster. Especially given a tendency for language, like society, to make everything shorter, faster and simpler, things look rather bleak for the genitive. Nevertheless, it is often associated with education and is still used frequently in writing. Therefore, it is unlikely that a freshly enrolled child in the year 2040 will never hear anything about the genitive at all. Still, the genitive would not be the first case of the German language to disappear from language use. Digging a little deeper into the Indo-European family tree of the German language, you can also find cases like the vocative, which was used for forms of address and calls. Or the ablative (the case of movement away from an object and of reason), which at least everyone who has had to deal with Latin has heard of.
But you also often find remnants of older words and spellings in writing. Daß or dass or yet das? is one of the most frequent phenomena that stand out when reading texts. Whilst daß has not really existed in the German language since the spelling reform, you still read it frequently in texts by older people. You can quite simply trace this back to the power of habit. If you take a trip into the future of the German language, you can probably never be sure, much like with fashion trends, what exactly is coming your way. Nevertheless, there are certain tendencies that one can suspect.
That in the future probably even more English words will be sprinkled into our vocabulary is, for example, no wonder: even nowadays you often don't even notice when you use the word "random" instead of "zufällig". But abbreviations like LOL ("Laughing Out Loud"), which have their origins in the early forms of social networks – and thus in written language use – are increasingly finding their way into spoken language.
This is because our language is influenced by young people. Every generation develops its own slang and trends. Often these are only reluctantly adopted by older generations. It is not uncommon for sentences to fall like: "How are you talking?" or "Do speak properly." Or for complete misunderstandings to occur between generations. But through this our language lives on and develops further, and even if some linguistic developments sound inelegant to our own ears, you can rarely stop them. Nevertheless, everyone can – much like with fashion and music – form their own opinion about linguistic developments and does not have to adopt them in that respect. Even though it is often similar in everyday life as with fashion trends: because you are surrounded by these, you often get used to them more easily and consequently find them less bad, until you find them, much like the platform trainers in your own wardrobe, in your own language use.