Language change

Language changeis the process of alteration in the features of a singlelanguage,or of languages in general, across a period of time. It is studied in several subfields oflinguistics:historical linguistics,sociolinguistics,andevolutionary linguistics.Traditional theories of historical linguistics identify three main types of change: systematic change in the pronunciation ofphonemes,orsound change;borrowing,in which features of a language or dialect are introduced or altered as a result of influence from another language or dialect; andanalogical change,in which the shape or grammatical behavior of a word is altered to more closely resemble that of another word.

Language change usually does not occur suddenly, but rather takes place via an extended period ofvariation,during which new and old linguistic features coexist. All living languages are continually undergoing change. Some commentators use derogatory labels such as "corruption" to suggest that language change constitutes a degradation in the quality of a language, especially when the change originates fromhuman erroror is aprescriptivelydiscouraged usage.^[1]Modern linguistics rejects this concept, since from a scientific point of view such innovations cannot be judged in terms of good or bad.^[2]^[3]John Lyonsnotes that "any standard of evaluation applied to language-change must be based upon a recognition of the various functions a language 'is called upon' to fulfil in the society which uses it".^[4]

Over a sufficiently long period of time, changes in a language can accumulate to such an extent that it is no longer recognizable as the same language. For instance,modern Englishis the result of centuries of language change applying toOld English,even though modern English is extremely divergent from Old English in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. The two may be thought of as distinct languages, but Modern English is a "descendant" of its "ancestor" Old English. When multiple languages are all descended from the same ancestor language, as theRomance languagesare fromVulgar Latin,they are said to form alanguage familyand be "genetically"related.

Causes

Economy: Speech communities tend to change their utterances to be as efficient and effective (with as little effort) as possible, while still reaching communicative goals. Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs and benefits.
- Theprinciple of least efforttends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms. Seevowel reduction,cluster reduction,lenition,andelision.After some time, a change may become widely accepted (it becomes a regularsound change) and may end up treated asstandard.For instance:going to[ˈɡoʊ.ɪŋ.tʊ]→gonna[ˈɡɔnə]or[ˈɡʌnə],with examples of both vowel reduction[ʊ]→[ə]and elision[nt]→[n],[oʊ.ɪ]→[ʌ].
Expressiveness: Common or overused language tends to lose its emotional or rhetorical intensity over time; therefore, new words and constructions are continuously employed to revive that intensity^[5]
Analogy:Over time, speech communities unconsciously apply patterns of rules in certain words, sounds, etc. to unrelated other words, sounds, etc.
Language contact:Words and constructions are borrowed from one language into another.^[6]
Cultural environment:As a culture evolves, new places, situations, and objects inevitably enter its language, whether or not the culture encounters different people.
Migration/Movement: Speech communities, moving into a region with a new or more complex linguistic situation, will influence, and be influenced by, language change; they sometimes even end up with entirely new languages, such as pidgins and creoles.^[6]
Imperfect learning: According to one view, children regularly learn the adult forms imperfectly, and the changed forms then turn into a new standard. Alternatively, imperfect learning occurs regularly in one part of society, such as an immigrant group, where the minority language forms asubstratum,and the changed forms can ultimately influence majority usage.^[7]
Social prestige: A language change towards adopting features that have more socialprestige,or away from ones with negative prestige,^[7]as in the case of theloss of rhoticityin the BritishReceived Pronunciationaccent.^[8]Such movements can go back and forth.^[9]

According toGuy Deutscher,the tricky question is "Why are changes not brought up short and stopped in their tracks? At first sight, there seem to be all the reasons in the world why society should never let the changes through." He sees the reason for tolerating change in the fact that we already are used to "synchronic variation",to the extent that we are hardly aware of it. For example, when we hear the word" wicked ", we automatically interpret it as either" evil "or" wonderful ", depending on whether it is uttered by an elderly lady or a teenager. Deutscher speculates that" [i]n a hundred years' time, when the original meaning of 'wicked' has all but been forgotten, people may wonder how it was ever possible for a word meaning 'evil' to change its sense to 'wonderful' so quickly. "^[5]

Types

Phonetic and phonological changes

Sound change—i.e., change in the pronunciation ofphonemes—can lead tophonological change(i.e., change in the relationships between phonemes within the structure of a language). For instance, if the pronunciation of one phoneme changes to become identical to that of another phoneme, the two original phonemes can merge into a single phoneme, reducing the total number of phonemes the language contains.

Determining the exact course of sound change in historical languages can pose difficulties, since the technology ofsound recordingdates only from the 19th century, and thus sound changes before that time must be inferred from written texts. Theorthographicalpractices of historical writers provide the main (indirect) evidence of how language sounds have changed over the centuries. Poetic devices such as rhyme and rhythm can also provide clues to earlier phonetic and phonological patterns.

A principal axiom of historical linguistics, established by the linguists of theNeogrammarianschool of thought in the 19th century, is that sound change is said to be "regular" —i.e., a given sound change simultaneously affects all words in which the relevant set of phonemes appears, rather than each word's pronunciation changing independently of each other. The degree to which the Neogrammarian hypothesis is an accurate description of how sound change takes place, rather than a useful approximation, is controversial; but it has proven extremely valuable to historical linguistics as aheuristic,and enabled the development of methodologies ofcomparative reconstructionandinternal reconstructionthat allow linguists to extrapolate backwards from known languages to the properties of earlier, unattested languagesand hypothesize sound changes that may have taken place in them.

Lexical changes

The study of lexical changes forms thediachronicportion of the science ofonomasiology.

The ongoing influx of new words into theEnglish 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. Throughoutits history,English has not onlyborrowed wordsfrom other languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings, whilstlosing some old words.

Dictionary-writerstry 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 eventually as "archaic" or "obsolete".

Spelling changes

Standardisation ofspellingoriginated centuries ago.^[vague]^{[citation needed]}Differences in spelling often catch the eye of a reader of a text from a previous century. The pre-print era had fewerliteratepeople: languages lacked fixed systems of orthography, and the manuscripts that survived often show words spelled according to regional pronunciation and to personal preference.

Semantic changes

Semantic changes are shifts in the meanings of existing words. Basic types of semantic change include:

pejoration,in which a term's connotation goes from positive to negative
amelioration, in which a term's connotations goes from negative to (more) positive
broadening, in which a term acquires additional potential uses
narrowing, in which a term's potential uses become more restrictive

After a word enters a language, its meaning can change as through a shift in thevalenceof its connotations. As an example, when "villain" entered English it meant 'peasant' or 'farmhand', but acquired the connotation 'low-born' or 'scoundrel', and today only the negative use survives. Thus 'villain' has undergonepejoration.Conversely, the word "wicked" is undergoing amelioration in colloquial contexts, shifting from its original sense of 'evil', to the much more positive one as of 2009^[update]of 'brilliant'.

Words' meanings may also change in terms of the breadth of their semantic domain. Narrowing a word limits its alternative meanings, whereas broadening associates new meanings with it. For example, "hound" (Old Englishhund) once referred to any dog, whereas in modern English it denotes only a particular type of dog. On the other hand, the word "dog" itself has been broadened from its Old English root 'dogge', the name of a particular breed, to become the general term for all domestic canines.^[10]

Syntactic change

Syntactic changeis the evolution of thesyntacticstructure of anatural language.

Over time, syntactic change is the greatest modifier of a particular language.^{[citation needed]}Massive changes – attributable either tocreolizationor torelexification– may occur both in syntax and in vocabulary. Syntactic change can also be purely language-internal, whether independent within the syntactic component or the eventual result of phonological or morphological change.^{[citation needed]}

Sociolinguistics

ThesociolinguistJennifer Coates, following William Labov, describes linguistic change as occurring in the context of linguisticheterogeneity.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."^[11]

The sociolinguistWilliam Labovrecorded the change inpronunciationin a relatively short period in the American resort ofMartha's Vineyardand showed how this resulted from social tensions and processes.^[12] Even in the relatively short time that broadcast media have recorded their work, one can observe the difference between thepronunciationof the newsreaders of the 1940s and the 1950s and the pronunciation of today. The greater acceptance and fashionability ofregional accentsin media may^{[original research?]}also reflect a more democratic, less formal society — compare the widespread adoption oflanguage policies.

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, in terms of both 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 ofamaoverfakat,both borrowed from Arabic and meaning "but", and their inverse usage correlation is statistically significant), also speculate that the word length increase can influence the common word choice preferences of authors.

Kadochnikov (2016) analyzes the political and economic logic behind the development of the Russian language. Ever since the emergence of the unified Russian state in the 15th and 16th centuries the government played a key role in standardizing the Russian language and developing itsprescriptive normswith the fundamental goal of ensuring that it can be efficiently used as a practical tool in all sorts of legal, judicial, administrative and economic affairs throughout the country.^[13]

Quantification

Altintas, Can, and Patton (2007) introduce a systematic approach to language change quantification by studying 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.

Language shift and social status

Languages perceived to be "higher status" stabilise or spread at the expense of other languages perceived by their own speakers to be "lower-status".

Historical examples are the early Welsh and Lutheran Bible translations, leading to the liturgical languages Welsh and High German thriving today, unlike other Celtic or German variants.^[14]

For prehistory, Forster and Renfrew (2011)^[15]argue that in some cases there is a correlation of language change with intrusive male Y chromosomes but not with female mtDNA. They then speculate that technological innovation (transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, or from stone to metal tools) or military prowess (as in the abduction of British women by Vikings toIceland) causes immigration of at least some males, and perceived status change. Then, in mixed-language marriages with these males, prehistoric women would often have chosen to transmit the "higher-status" spouse's language to their children, yielding the language/Y-chromosome correlation seen today.

Notes

^Lyons, John (1 June 1968).Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics.Cambridge University Press. p. 42.ISBN 978-0-521-09510-5.The traditional grammarian tended to assume [...] that it was his task, as a grammarian, to 'preserve' this form of language from 'corruption'.
^Joan Bybee (2015).Language Change.Cambridge University Press. pp. 10–11.ISBN 9781107020160.
^Lyle Campbell (2004).Historical Linguistics: An Introduction.MIT Press. pp. 3–4.ISBN 9780262532679.
^John Lyons (1 June 1968).Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics.Cambridge University Press. pp. 42–44.ISBN 978-0-521-09510-5.
^^a ^bThe Unfolding of Language, 2005, chapter 2, esp. pp. 63, 69 and 71
^^a ^b"The teaching of pidgin and Creole studies - LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies".Retrieved25 September2016.
^^a ^bThe Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language(1997, p. 335)
^Ben (7 October 2012)."Was Received Pronunciation Ever Rhotic?".Retrieved25 September2016.
^"The fall of the r-less class - Macmillan".14 November 2011.Retrieved25 September2016.
^Crowley, Terry; Bowern, Claire (2010).An Introduction to Historical Linguistics.New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 200–201.ISBN 978-0195365542.
^Coates, 1993: 169
^ Labov, William (1963). "The social motivation of a sound change".Word.19(3): 273–309.doi:10.1080/00437956.1963.11659799.S2CID 140505974.
^Kadochnikov, Denis (2016).Languages, Regional Conflicts and Economic Development: Russia. In: Ginsburgh, V., Weber, S. (Eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of Economics and Language.London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 538–580.
^Barker, Christopher (1588).The Bible in Welsh.London.
^Forster P, Renfrew C; Renfrew (2011)."Mother tongue and Y chromosomes".Science.333(6048): 1390–1391.Bibcode:2011Sci...333.1390F.doi:10.1126/science.1205331.PMID 21903800.S2CID 43916070.

References

Journals

Altintas, K.; Can, F.; Patton, J. M. (2007)."Language Change Quantification Using Time-separated Parallel Translations"(PDF).Literary and Linguistic Computing.22(4): 375–393.doi:10.1093/llc/fqm026.hdl:11693/23342.
Can, F.; Patton, J. M. (2010)."Change of Word Characteristics in 20th Century Turkish Literature: A Statistical Analysis"(PDF).Journal of Quantitative Linguistics.17(3): 167–190.doi:10.1080/09296174.2010.485444.hdl:11693/38195.S2CID 9236823.

Books

Coates, Jennifer (1993).Women, men, and language: a sociolinguistic account of gender differences in language.Studies in language and linguistics (2 ed.). Longman. p. 228.ISBN 978-0-582-07492-7.Retrieved2010-03-30.
Labov, William(1994, 2001),Principles of Linguistic Change(vol.IInternal Factors,1994; vol.IISocial Factors,2001), Blackwell.
Lewis, G. (1999).The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success.Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wardhaugh, R. (1986),An Introduction to Sociolinguistics,Oxford/ New York.

External links

Sounds Familiar?The British Library website provides audio examples of changing accents and dialects from across the UK.

[1] Lyons, John (1 June 1968).Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics.Cambridge University Press. p. 42.ISBN 978-0-521-09510-5.The traditional grammarian tended to assume [...] that it was his task, as a grammarian, to 'preserve' this form of language from 'corruption'.

[2] Joan Bybee (2015).Language Change.Cambridge University Press. pp. 10–11.ISBN 9781107020160.

[3] Lyle Campbell (2004).Historical Linguistics: An Introduction.MIT Press. pp. 3–4.ISBN 9780262532679.

[4] John Lyons (1 June 1968).Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics.Cambridge University Press. pp. 42–44.ISBN 978-0-521-09510-5.

[Deutscher-5] The Unfolding of Language, 2005, chapter 2, esp. pp. 63, 69 and 71

[llas.ac.uk-6] "The teaching of pidgin and Creole studies - LLAS Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies".Retrieved25 September2016.

[Cambridge-7] The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language(1997, p. 335)

[8] Ben (7 October 2012)."Was Received Pronunciation Ever Rhotic?".Retrieved25 September2016.

[9] "The fall of the r-less class - Macmillan".14 November 2011.Retrieved25 September2016.

[10] Crowley, Terry; Bowern, Claire (2010).An Introduction to Historical Linguistics.New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 200–201.ISBN 978-0195365542.

[11] Coates, 1993: 169

[12] Labov, William (1963). "The social motivation of a sound change".Word.19(3): 273–309.doi:10.1080/00437956.1963.11659799.S2CID 140505974.

[13] Kadochnikov, Denis (2016).Languages, Regional Conflicts and Economic Development: Russia. In: Ginsburgh, V., Weber, S. (Eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of Economics and Language.London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 538–580.

[14] Barker, Christopher (1588).The Bible in Welsh.London.

[15] Forster P, Renfrew C; Renfrew (2011)."Mother tongue and Y chromosomes".Science.333(6048): 1390–1391.Bibcode:2011Sci...333.1390F.doi:10.1126/science.1205331.PMID 21903800.S2CID 43916070.

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v t e Historical linguistics
Topics	Comparative Linguistics Synchrony and diachrony Protolanguage Language death Neogrammarians More...
Language change	Sound change Language change Semantic change Syntactic change Archaism
Relationship withanthropology	Father Tongue hypothesis Farming/language dispersal hypothesis
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