“Eureka!” That was the cry of the New York Times executive editor A. M. Rosenthal in early 1979, when he hit upon an idea for a new column to run in the front of the magazine. Rosenthal tapped William Safire, then a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The Times, to create a column exploring the vagaries of the English language. As Safire later recalled, Rosenthal figured the series “could be sustained for a year, maybe.”

It has been 32 years since Rosenthal’s Eureka moment, and On Language is finally coming to a close, at least in its current incarnation. For more than 30 of those years, it was the domain of the Language Maven (as Safire jauntily called himself), until his passing in September 2009. I’ve had the privilege of carrying on that legacy for the past year, but now it is time to bid adieu, after some 1,500 dispatches from the frontiers of language.

What does the future hold for our language? The great British language scholar David Crystal once warned me, “Never predict the future with language.” But it’s in our human nature to at least try. Lately I’ve been thinking about the language world that my 4-year-old son, Blake, will grow up into. Will English wax or wane in its global influence during his lifetime? Will the country’s demographic shifts demand a greater acceptance of multilingualism, and will there be a freer commingling of different speech varieties through what sociolinguists call “code-switching” and “code-mixing”? It may be an affront to those who uphold the sanctity of English as the national language, but heterogeneity looks as if it will increasingly be the name of the game.

One thing is clear, as I watch Blake make a Dr. Seuss book come alive on the family iPad with a casual swipe of the finger: Language will become more technologically mediated. The ever-expanding power and flexibility of our personal gadgets, combined with the computing prowess of servers we connect to in “the cloud,” makes it a dead certainty that tech will rule the language of even the most reluctant neo-Luddite.