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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