GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES

VARIACIÓN Y CAMBIO LINGÜÍSTICO EN LENGUA INGLESA

Dras. Senra y Barreiro

Unit 1: Introduction to Language Variation and Change. Historical

Sociolinguistics vs Synchronic Sociolinguistics.
 
The course Variación y cambio lingüístico en lengua inglesa aims to
provide a guide to the work done in the fields of Sociolinguistics and
Historical Sociolinguistics. This course will introduce students into the
field of Language Variation and Change and Historical Sociolinguistics,
encouraging further study and research in the area. We will mainly
focus on some of the insights that Variationist Sociolinguistics has
provided for the study of ongoing change in the language, but we will
also look at Sociolinguistics and the History of English, the linguistic
consequences of contact between speakers of different varieties, and
English in contact with other languages. Some of the topics studied in
the courses Sociolingüística inglesa and Variaciones fonético-fonológicas
de la lengua inglesa in the Grado will be revised and expanded. It must
be stressed that, even though the scope of the course is broad, time
limitations (it is a 5-credit course) makes it impossible to concentrate on
all issues related to language variation and change.
Unit 1 contains an overview of language variation and change on
the one hand, and (Socio-)Historical Linguistics and Sociolinguistics on
the other. The contents of the unit are (1) Language Variation and
Change; (2) Historical Sociolinguistics vs Synchronic Linguistics (please
keep in mind that the contents provided in the Guía de Curso for this
unit have changed slightly).

 
1. Language Variation and Change

Language variation and change is the main topic of this course. We will
concentrate on how language variants appear and spread in the
community. Languages are not permanent entities. If we have a look at
the opening extract from the Lord's Prayer from different periods of the
English language or an extract from both a medieval and modern
version of Cantar de Mío Cid we see that languages can change a lot
over a period of time. In the case of the Lord's Prayer the English
language of the 21st century is very different from Old English or
Middle English.

Old English (c. 400 to c. 1100): Fæder ure, þu þe art on heofonum, si

þin nama gehalgod. To becume þin rice (West-Saxon).
Middle English (c. 1100-1500): Fader oure þat is i heuen. Blessid bi
þi name to neuen. Come to us þi kingdome0.
Early Modern English (c. 1500-1800): Our father which art in
heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come.
Modern English (from c. 1800): Our father who is in heaven, may
your name be sacred. Let your kingdom come.

A fragment from CANTAR DE MÍO CID (medieval version):

De los sos oios tan fuerte mientre lorando Tornaua la cabeça e estaua
los catando: Vio puertas abiertase vços sin cannados, Alcandaras uazias sin
pielles e sin mantos, E sin falcones e sin adtores mudados. Sospiro Myo Çid ca
mucho auie grandes cuydados. Ffablo Myo Çid bien e tan mesurado: Grado a ti
Sennor Padre que estas en alto, Esto me an buelto myos enemigos malos. Alli
pienssan de aguiiar, allisueltan las riendas: A la exida de Biuar ouieron la

 
corneia diestra, E entrando a Burgos ouieron lasiniestra. Meçio Myo Çid los
ombros e engrameo la tiesta: Albricia Albar Ffanez ca echados somos de tierra.

(Modern version)
De sus ojos fuertemente llorando, de un lado a otro volvía la cabeza
mirándolos; Vio las puertas abiertas y contrapuertas sin candados, las
perchas vacías, sin pieles y sin mantos y sin halcones y sin azores ya
pelechados. Suspiró Mio Cid sumamente mesurado. ¡Bendito seas,
Señor Padre, que estás en lo alto! ¡Esto me han devuelto mis enemigos
malvados! Entonces deciden aguijar a riendas sueltas. A la salida de
Vivar vieron una corneja a la derecha, a la entrada de Burgos la vieron
a la izquierda. Se encogió Mio Cid de hombros y alzó la cabeza.
¡Albricia, Albar Fáñez, nos echan de nuestra tierra!

Languages change due to external and internal causes,

sociolinguistic factors and internal psychological factors that reside in
the structure of the language and the minds of the speakers. Language
change occurs due to variation within a language and/or because of
contacts with other languages.
It is not possible to predict language change, either internal or
external. However for centuries scholars have sought explanations for
why certain changes might have taken place or why certain elements
might be retained: (1) system internal explanations: language is a
system in which internal forces operate and lead to change; (2)
psychological explanations; (3) geographical explanations: some people
maintained that consonant changes begin in mountain regions due to
the intensity of expiration in high altitudes (Aitchinson 1991: 105); (4)
sociolinguistic explanations: language changes because the speakers
are social beings and use different linguistic variants depending on their
role in society. It has been demonstrated that social background, gender
and context may affect the way you speak and the way others perceive
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your speech. Society decides which language varieties are prestigious
and which are not. It has also been demonstrated that societal factors
can be strongly involved in determining or influencing the speed of
linguistic change (Trudgill 2011: 2).
Some research topics related to language change include local
dialects, standard languages, sociolects, difference between spoken and
written language, among others.
For language change to take place there must be two equivalent
linguistic forms, one giving way to the other eventually. Sociolinguists
distinguish between changes from above and changes from below.
They refer both to levels of conscious awareness as well as position in
the social hierarchy. Changes from below involve changes we are not
fully aware of, and also less prestigious varieties influencing more
prestigious ones. Changes from above refer to changes we are
consciously aware of and also to linguistic items, mainly new sounds
found in prestigious varieties and introduced by the dominant social
class.
The question now is What can change? Language change can
occur on every linguistic level. Speech sounds, morphology, and lexicon
can change. So we have phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical
and pragmatic changes. Some examples of change are: new words can
appear through loan (Modern Icelandic bíll 'car' from Danish bil), a word
can acquire new meanings (in Modern Icelandic the word sími 'long
thread' started to be use with the meaning 'telephone'). Linguistic
elements can also change their status within the linguistic system (eg.
English -ly, German -lich, Dutch -lijk, is now a suffix but it used to be a
full lexical noun in Gothic leik 'body'). This process of a lexical word
changing into a grammatical element is called gramaticalization.
Some important terms when studying language variation and
change are speech community, variation, high prestige and low prestige
varieties, social network, internal vs external change, standard language,

 
sociolinguistic variable, conscious and unconscious change, lexical
diffusion, internally and externally motivated language change.

2. Historical Sociolinguistics vs Synchronic Sociolinguistics

The study of language change has altered its character in recent years.
Scholars have shifted from reconstructing the earliest stages of
languages (comparative method) and paying no attention to changes
currently taking place, to using Sociolinguistics methodology to study
changes that took place in the past.
In "Some principles of linguistic methodology" Labov classified the
different subfields of Linguistics according to whether their practitioners
were to be found working in "the library, the bush, the closet, the
laboratory ..... [or] the street" (99). Those working in the library were the
historical linguists, those in the bush were the anthropological
linguists, those at the laboratory the psycholinguists, and the closet
was the home of the theoretical linguists. In this section you will find an
overview of the subfields of Historical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, and
Historical Sociolinguistics (including the benefit of Corpus Linguistics),
and their impact on the field of language variation and change.

2.1. Historical Linguistics

Linguistics as we know it today appeared at the beginning of the 20th

century and developed independently in Europe and America. On the
one hand, Europeans had a philosophical tradition and a knowledge of
the historical study of languages based on the 19th century
comparative philology. Studies focused mainly on the evolution of
classical languages and to a lesser extent on modern European
languages through the analysis of written testimony. The study of living
languages was considered secondary and it was limited to the study of
regional dialectology.

 
 In America, on the other hand, linguistic research focused on
Amerindian languages for which no written records were kept, so that it
was impossible to develop an approach based purely on written texts. It
was decided, therefore, to carry out an anthropological study of
languages. Some of the most outstanding scholars in this field were
Franz Boas and Edward Sapir.
In the 19th century, there is a new perception into the study of
Linguistics influenced by Darwinian studies in which the language is
considered as an organized system. Besides, history and historical
comparison are introduced in Linguistics. Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp
and Jacob Grimm are considered the precursors of historical-
comparative linguistics. Comparative studies between languages
promoted more scientific studies which sought regularities in order to
reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language.
   The  second half of the  19th  century  witnessed a major  success of 
historical-comparative  linguistics,  studied  not only in Europe  but also  in
the U.S.  At this time  the  Neogrammarian  School was founded in
Germany.  The Neogrammarians  (Junggrammatiker) developed  the theory
that language change is systematic and regular, and is governed by a set
of rules. It is based on two fundamental principles: 1) phonological
change takes place according to mechanical laws that have no
exceptions (principle of regularity), 2) importance of analogy in the
creation of new forms. Their attention focused mainly on diachrony.
However, limitations in Comparative and Historical Linguistics
were soon discovered, since not all exceptions can be explained. Despite
the benefits of comparative philology in Linguistics, many questions
remain unresolved. For example, Basque, Sumerian and Etruscan, have
no place within the Indo-European family since their relationship to any
other language either living or dead hasn't been proved. The method
assumes that when two languages are separated from the mother
tongue, they stop influencing each other, which is not entirely true.
Moreover, Comparative Linguistics is interested in spelling rather than

 
sounds. In this sense, in the 20th century there was a reaction against
purely linguistic studies and in favour of the study of speech variation
(Dialectology or Geographical Linguistics).
Both the typological and the genealogical classification of languages
ignore the importance of the cultural relationship between languages,
the fact that languages influence one another by contact between them,
for example, with loanwords. Sometimes it is impossible to know if two
languages are similar because they share a common origin or because
of the contact between them. These limitations led to a new approach to
the study of languages, Structuralism, which studies language as a
structure, a system that allows changes.
1957 was the beginning of Generative Linguistics with the
publication of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures. Linguistics shifts
to a psycho-biological stage, with interest in the way in which children
acquire languages on the basis of an abstract universal grammar
common to all languages.

2.2. Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is a quite recent discipline whose aim is to study the

social uses of language, language as a social phenomenon, and also
language diversity/varieties. It started in the 60s as an opposition to
Chomsky's idea of abstracting language away from everyday context,
and of an ideal speaker/listener communication in a totally
homogeneous community. Sociolinguists is interested in language use
within human societies since it is believed that there is a close
relationship between language and society, and that language reflects
social patterns and divisions. Sociolinguists concentrate more on
synchrony.
In Europe, Sociolinguistics began with the study of Historical
Linguistics and Linguistic Geography, with three main areas of interest:
Dialectology, the study of regional languages, and the language

 
situation of colonized countries. In America, on the other hand, the
study of Sociolinguistics arises from contact of linguists with other
disciplines such as Anthropology and Sociology. Sociolinguistics today
is divided into subfields such as Pragmatics, Studies of Pidgins and
Creoles, Planning Studies and Language Policy, Historical
Sociolinguistics, among others. Sociolinguistics is connected with the
social sciences, particularly Sociology, Anthropology, Social Psychology
and Education.
Sociolinguistics has fostered a new vision of linguistic variation and
change as inherent components of languages, and has a highly
interdisciplinary nature as it can be applied to various fields of
research. The interaction with other disciplines has resulted in new
fields among which are Sociology of Language, Linguistic Anthropology,
Social Psychology and Ethnography of Communication. Sociolinguistics
has also contributed greatly to the advancement of Historical
Linguistics, since the study of linguistic variation can help understand
historical phenomena and vice versa (Labov’s principle of uniformity
(1994), indicating that through linguistic phenomena studied in the
present we can explain those changes that took place in the past, that
is, you can use the present to explain the past). In this sense, Görlach
maintains:

Scholars who were convinced in the 1970s that historical

linguistics was dead and buried […] have come to realize that
such statements or predictions were premature. […] European
scholars were also foremost in the modernization of the
discipline until a new paradigm was created by Chomsky – but
others like Labov, Lass or Milroy stuck to sociohistorical
interpretation, now taken up with new vigour and
methodological precision. (2003: 1)

 
Major sociolinguistic studies in recent decades have focused on
determining the social evolution of language variants. The study of the
social use of language began in 1963 when Labov presented the first
report of sociolinguistic research at the annual meeting of the Linguistic
Society of America and published "The social motivation of a sound
change". Labov has been the dominant figure in Sociolinguistics from
the beginnings of the discipline in the mid 60s. Disciple of Uriel
Weinreich at Columbia University, he was the founder of the
Sociolinguistics Program at the University of Pennsylvania. His research
project in 1963 on a sound change in progress in Martha's Vineyard
and his PhD in 1964 on the sociolinguistic stratification of the city of
New York introduced new techniques in sample surveys, natural
experimentation and quantitative analysis in linguistic research. Labov
later studied English vernacular African Americans in Harlem starting
in 1965. His work culminated in the Atlas of North American English
(2006) (http://www.atlas.mouton-content.com/) with computerized
methods which have transformed modern Dialectology. Labov studied
for the first time language change in progress. His research had an
enormous impact on our knowledge of the mechanisms and motivations
of language variation and change within a community. You will read
more about this topic in Kiesling’s book Linguistic Variation and Change.
In 1968 the linguists Weinreich, Labov and Herzog published
their article "Empirical foundations for a theory of language change" in
which they studied language change and proposed social motivation as
its most influential cause. Unlike previous trends centred on the
language system as an abstract entity, Sociolinguistics leaves a space
open to the individual who uses that instrument in their interactions
with others, not only to communicate but also to define themselves
socially. Language should be understood as a social phenomenon that
establishes a relationship between the speakers and their social
environment, and among other members of the linguistic community.

 
 Two undeniable contributions of Sociolinguistics to the study of
language change are the careful and accurate observation of the present
variants, methods of data recording, and the analysis and evaluation of
the data using the latest technology. As mentioned above, these results
can be extrapolated to the past, following the uniformity principle
adopted from modern Geology.
The Labovian method was introduced in the UK by the linguists
Peter Trudgill, Lesley and James Milroy and Suzanne Romaine in the
70s and early 80s. From this date, Trudgill began to study language
contact, especially dialects in contact.
In this course we are concentrating on the variationist approach
to Sociolinguistics as presented in Kiesling’s book. The basic methods in
variationist studies are the following (Mesthrie, R. et. Al. 2012: 76):

1. Identify linguistic features that vary in a community.

2. Gather data from the community by selecting a suitable sample of
people.
3. Conduct an interview involving informal continuous speech as well as
more formal dimensions of language use like reading out a passage
aloud.
4. Analyse the data, noting the frequency of each relevant linguistic
feature.
5. Select relevant social units like age groups, sex, social class.
6. Ascertain significant correlations between the social groups and
particular speech.

2.3. Historical Sociolinguistics

Even though, as explained above, in this course we are going to expand

on the variationist approach to language change, it is important to pay
some attention to Historical Sociolinguistics. English Historical

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Sociolinguistics (Socio-historical Linguistics) is a discipline that
emerged in the 80s inspired by Labov's work, and which consists in
applying Sociolinguistic methodology to historical data, explaining
variation and change in the history of English.
Historical Linguistics  is concerned with  studying  how  languages
change  over  time and  developing  and implementing methods for
reconstructing early stages  of a language  based on  written records  that
have been preserved  over  the centuries.    Present-day sociolinguistic
methodology can be employed to historical data, to explain variation
and change in the history of English.
Historical linguists are both historians and linguists. They are
responsible for collecting  reliable data  and evaluating  the  sources.  They
often have to face the problem of studying periods for which historical
records are not documented. According to Lass:
 
their tradecraft combines those of both disciplines. As historians
they are bound by the standard constraints on all historians
(cosmologists, paleontologists, text editors, musicologists…); as
linguists by general linguistic theory of one kind or another. (1997:
xiv)

Historical Linguistics has changed considerably in recent years.

Traditionally linguists engaged in reconstructing the earliest stages of
the language and describing phonological changes over time. They did
not pay much attention to changes from a synchronic point of view, to
syntactic changes, to pidgin and creole languages, language death, or
sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors underlying many alterations
or changes. In the last thirty years all these issues that had been
abandoned in the past are receiving a lot of attention. In this sense,
Historical Linguistics has experienced a methodological and conceptual
transformation in recent decades, and it has been enriched by
contributions from other disciplines such as Sociolinguistics, Corpus

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Linguistics, studies in language change, and Contact Linguistics.
According to Tejada Caller:

La actual LH [Lingüística Histórica] y, por tanto, la actual

historia de la lengua inglesa no queda reducida a la pura
sistematización estructural de la lengua a través del tiempo, a
las curiosidades que pueda ofrecer la etimología de las palabras
individuales ni desde luego a la erudición complaciente del
análisis filológico de ciertos textos canonizados. Esta disciplina
vuelve a erigirse, casi como en el siglo pasado, en centro de la
investigación lingüística y social contemporánea, con
perspectivas renovadas, nuevas preguntas que resolver y nuevos
conceptos centrales, establecidos sobre todo a través de la
investigación interdisciplinar. (1999: 67-8)

Historical Sociolinguistics appears as a new discipline with similar

aims to those of Sociolinguistics, although scholars working in this field
have focused on the sociopolitical context of the evolution of languages
rather than on a descriptive and detailed documentation of the
individual forms a language. The main difference with Sociolinguistics
lies in that the application of methods of comparative and internal
reconstruction are essential in Historical Linguistics, but not in studies
of variation. Synchronic Sociolinguistics often focuses on the study of
variation and change at the phonological level, while Diachronic
Sociolinguistics often focuses on the grammatical levels.
Among its most outstanding representatives are Suzanne Romaine,
James and Leslie Milroy, Matti Rissanen, Michael Samuels, Peter
Trudgill, Richard Hogg, Jeremy Smith, Manfred Görlach, Einar Haugen,
Jacek Fisiak, and Roger Lass. These authors have focused on applying
the principles of Sociolinguistics to the study of historical records.
Historical Sociolinguistics has advanced dramatically in the last
twenty years with a special mention to the Finnish linguists Merya Kyto

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Finnish linguists, Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Irma
Taavitsainen, Arja Nurmi and Anneli Meruman-Solin who have been
applying the principles of Sociolinguistics to English historical studies
since the 90s. In 1991, the Academy of Finland funded a project entitled
"Sociolinguistics and Language History" directed by professors Tertu
Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg whose aim main was to
compile a corpus to facilitate sociolinguistic research applied to the
history of English.
This project resulted in the Corpus of Early English
Correspondence (http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/domains/CEEC.html)
whose objective was to apply sociolinguistic methods to historical data.
This corpus is composed of letters that were selected systematically
between men and women, young and adult, from different social strata
(although given the high level of illiteracy among women in the
Renaissance, the corpus contains more letters written by men than by
women). They also attempted to cover all the regions of England,
although most of the rural population was illiterate. The corpus is
based on four regions: London, East Anglia, the North and the Court
(royal family, officials, those who lived in Westminster). Attention was
also paid to the contents of the letters, ranging from love letters to
family or business matters.
Historical Sociolinguistics, unlike synchronic Sociolinguistics,
faces a number of problems. The data available to historical
sociolinguists consists mainly of texts written in the past that have been
preserved by chance. As Lass explains:

The historical dialectologist’s workspace can be likened to an

archaeological dig or a crime scene. All three are venues whose
detailed history needs to be reconstructed. It is a commonplace
in archaeology and forensic praxis that as far as possible (a) the
scene must not be contaminated by material brought in by the
investigator or anyone else, and (b) the chain of custody (the

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 sequence of provenances of all objects found on the scene) must
be immaculate. (2004: 21)

According to Lass (2004), no text should be considered as a

historical witness if it contains emendations, modernizations (replacing
letters thorn, eth, yogh, etc.), alteration of the scribe’s punctuation, any
attempt at reconstruction through several versions, or any form of
standardization of spelling variables. In this sense, Laing (2004: 49)
states that the study of any past stage of a language is problematic,
because the only witness is the written text. These texts present
variation and occasionally the textual language is not necessarily
equivalent to the spoken language of the scribe. Furthermore, the texts
are often incomplete and isolated from the context in which they
originated. Moreover, in many cases not all styles, registers or varieties
are represented in the texts preserved.

2.3.1. Corpus Linguistics in (Socio-)Historical Linguistic Research

Corpus Linguistics as we know it today emerged in the late 60s with the
Survey of English Usage (SEU) promoted by Sir Randolph Quirk, and
with the famous Brown University Corpus compiled by Nelson Francis
and Henry Kucera in 1964. Text corpora offer many possibilities to
researchers: we can count a word frequency in one or various texts, we
can search different types of collocations, etc.
English Historical Linguistics has echoed the usefulness of
Corpus Linguistics and for more than a decade has been benefiting
from its potential. There is now a clear interest among historical
linguists in the use and creation of electronic corpora for research
because they see them as a source of information to study the changes
in the language over time, for example, comparing the use in a given
period with the use at a later time, or by diachronic studies of regional
varieties of English. For a long time the main problem for researchers

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was the lack of representative historical corpora that could be used in
the diachronic study of language. However, today the number of
computerized text corpora is growing rapidly. This seems to be a natural
evolution as historical linguists have always based their research on
collections of texts from early periods to document or study language
change. As a result many historical linguists have shifted their focus of
attention to research based on electronic corpora.
Historical linguists need corpora containing texts from different
genres and periods. Diachronic corpora allow a large number of
investigations since they can be used to study lexical, grammatical,
dialectological and registers features (eg. how the language of men and
women has changed over the centuries, or which linguistic features of a
text are or are not in other texts from the same period). The
computerized corpora are one of the most widely used tools in modern
Dialectology.
The University of Helsinki is one of the centres of expertise for
Corpus Linguistics whose main objective is to show how you can work
with English diachronic corpora structured according to discourse types
and text genres.
The best know English historical corpus is the Helsinki Corpus of
English Texts (http://kh.aksis.uib.no/icame/manuals/HC/index.htm)
containing about 1.6 million words dating from the Early Old English
period (850) until the end of the Early Modern English period (1710),
arranged in periods of 100 years. The corpus covers a wide range of
genres (legal texts, scientific, sermons, newspapers, plays, etc.), regional
variations and sociolinguistic variables such as sex, age, education and
social class. This project began in 1984 under the leadership of Matti
Rissanen and Ossi Ihalainen at the University of Helsinki. Although this
corpus is not tagged, each text contains information about the author,
date of composition, and dialect. The Helsinki Corpus was inspired by
the post-Labovian philosophy and was explicitly designed to facilitate
quantitative and stylistic studies.

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References

Aitchinson, J. 1991. Language Change: Progress or Decay? Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.
Chomsky, N. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague and Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter.
Görlach, M. 2003. Topics in English Historical Linguistics. Heideblberg:
Carl Winter.
Labov, W. 1972. "Some principles of linguistic methodology." Language
in Society 1: 97-120.
Laing, M. 2004. “Multidimensionality: Time, Space and Stratigraphy in
Historical Dialectology”. En Dossena, M. y R. Lass (eds.) 2004.
Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology. Bern: Peter
Lang. 49–96.
Lass, R. 1997. Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lass, R. 2004. “Ut custodiant litteras: editions, corpora and
witnesshood”. En Dossena, M. and R. Lass, Roger (eds.) 2004.
Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology. Bern: Peter
Lang. 21-48.
Mesthrie, R. et al. (eds.) (2nd edition). 2009. Introducing
Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Tejada Caller, P. 1999. El cambio lingüístico: Claves para interpretar la
lengua inglesa. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.
Trudgil, P. 2011. Sociolinguistic Typology. Social Determinants of
Linguistic Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Assignments

1. Give two examples, from a language you know well, of variants which
are increasingly being used. Choose an example of a lexical variant and
one of a variant from a different linguistic area.
2. Have young people got a special role in the process of language
change? Does change always start with them? What is the role of the
other social groups in language change? What could be the function of
the media (TV, radio and internet) in language change?
3. What is phonological change?
4. With your family and friends, can you trace linguistic changes across
the generations? Where is this easiest to see: with lexis, phonology, or
structure?
5. Identify a characteristic variable in the variety spoken where you
come from. Is its use seen positively by (a) insiders and (b) outsiders?
6. Go to the BBC Learning English website
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/newsenglish/witn
/2009/01/090102_new_words.shtml) and read the article about new
words in English.
7. Go to the Atlas of North American English
(http://www.atlas.mouton-content.com/). Click on “Introductory
concepts” and go through “the study of dialect” and “dialect surveys” in
North America and the UK. Then click on “the study of sound” and go
through the auditory and acoustic analysis sections.
8. Go to the Corpus of Early English Correspondence website
(http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC/generalintro.ht
ml) and read the general introduction to understand how the
compilation took place.
9. Go to Professor Hickey's website (http://www.uni-
due.de/~lan300/HICKEY.htm), click on "Studying the history of
English" and read the section on language change.

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