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Why language change

Language change

Language change is the phenomenon whereby phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other

features of language vary over time. The effect on language over time is known as diachronic change.

Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern themselves with studying language change: historical

linguistics and sociolinguistics. Historical linguists examine how people in the past used language and

seek to determine how subsequent languages derive from previous ones and relate to one another.

Sociolinguists study the origins of language changes and want to explain how society and changes in

society influence language.

Causes of lang change

economy: Speakers tend to make their utterances as efficient and effective as possible to reach

communicative goals. Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs and benefits.

the principle of least effort: Speakers especially use economy in their articulation, which tends to result

in phonetic reduction of speech forms. See vowel reduction, cluster reduction, lenition, and elision.

After some time a change may become widely accepted (it becomes a regular sound change) and may

end up treated as a standard. For instance: going to [o.nt] gonna [n], with examples of both

vowel reduction [] [] and elision [nt] [n], [o.] [].

analogy - reducing word forms by likening different forms of the word to the root.

language contact - the borrowing of words from foreign languages.

the medium of communication

cultural environment: Groups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and objects in their

language, whether they encounter different people there or not.

Rudi Keller discusses language change in the context of evolutionary process: "the historical evolution of

language", proposing his invisible hand explanation.[1]

Types of language change

All languages change constantly, and do so in many and varied ways. Each generation notes how other

generations "talk funny".

Marcel Cohen details various types of language change under the overall headings of the external

evolution[2] and internal evolution of languages.[3]

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Lexical changes

The study of lexical changes forms the diachronic portion of the science of onomasiology.

The ongoing influx of new words in the English language (for example) helps make it a rich field for

investigation into language change, despite the difficulty of defining precisely and accurately the

vocabulary available to speakers of English. Throughout its history English has not only borrowed words

from other languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings, whilst losing

some old words.

Dictionary-writers try to keep track of the changes in languages by recording (and, ideally, dating) the

appearance in a language of new words, or of new usages for existing words. By the same token, they

may tag some words as "archaic" or "obsolete".

Phonetic and phonological changes

Main articles: sound change and phonological change

The concept of sound change covers both phonetic and phonological developments.

The sociolinguist William Labov recorded the change in pronunciation in a relatively short period in the

American resort of Marthas Vineyard and showed how this resulted from social tensions and

processes.[4] Even in the relatively short time that broadcast media have recorded their work, one can

observe the difference between the pronunciation of the newsreaders of the 1940s and the 1950s and

the pronunciation of today. The greater acceptance and fashionability of regional accents in media

may[original research?] also reflect a more democratic, less formal society compare the widespread

adoption of language policies.

The mapping and recording of small-scale phonological changes poses difficulties, especially as the

practical technology of sound recording dates only from the 19th century. Written texts provide the

main (indirect) evidence of how language sounds have changed over the centuries . But note Ferdinand

de Saussure's work on postulating the existence and disappearance of laryngeals in Proto-Indo-

European as an example of other methods of detecting/reconstructing sound-changes within historical

linguistics.

Spelling changes

Standardisation of spelling originated relatively recently.[citation needed] Differences in spelling often

catch the eye of a reader of a text from a previous century. The pre-print era had fewer literate people:languages lacked fixed systems of orthography, and the handwritten manuscripts that survive often

show words spelled according to regional pronunciation and to personal preference.

Semantic changes

Main article: Semantic change

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Semantic changes include

pejoration, in which a term acquires a negative association

amelioration, in which a term acquires a positive association

widening, in which a term acquires a broader meaning

narrowing, in which a term acquires a narrower meaning

Sociolinguistics and language change

The sociolinguist Jennifer Coates, following William Labov, describes linguistic change as occurring in the

context of linguistic heterogeneity. She explains that [l]inguistic change can be said to have taken place

when a new linguistic form, used by some sub-group within a speech community, is adopted by other

members of that community and accepted as the norm.[5]

Can and Patton (2010) provide a quantitative analysis of twentieth century Turkish literature using forty

novels of forty authors. Using weighted least squares regression and a sliding window approach they

show that as time passes, words, both in terms of tokens (in text) and types (in vocabulary), have

become longer. They indicate that the increase in word lengths with time can be attributed to the

government-initiated language reform of the 20th century. This reform aimed at replacing foreign

words used in Turkish, especially Arabic- and Persian-based words (since they were in majority when the

reform was initiated in early 1930s), with newly coined pure Turkish neologisms created by adding

suffixes to Turkish word stems (Lewis, 1999).

Can and Patton (2010), based on their observations of the change of a specific word use (more

specifically in newer works the preference of ama over fakat, where both are borrowed from Arabic

and mean but in English, and their inverse usage correlation is statistically significant), also speculate

that the word length increase can influence the common word choice preferences of authors.

]Quantifying language change

Altintas, Can, and Patton (2007) introduce a systematic approach to language change quantification bystudying unconsciously-used language features in time-separated parallel translations. For this purpose,

they use objective style markers such as vocabulary richness and lengths of words, word stems and

suffixes, and employ statistical methods to measure their changes over time.

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Why do languages change?

Factors which do not cause language change:

Geography, e.g. Grimms law (a consonant shift in

Germanic) due to life in the Alps: running up and

down mountains caused huffing and puffing which

caused voiceless stops to become fricatives

Racial/anatomical factors, e.g. Grimms law result of

earwax build-up among speakers which triggered

misperception of Indo-European consonants

Cultural factors related to work ethic, e.g. Languages

change because younger generation is lazy