1 Language change

Language change is the process of alteration in the features of a single language, or

of languages in general, across a period of time. It is studied in several subfields
of linguistics: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistics.
Traditional theories of historical linguistics identify three main types of change:
systematic change in the pronunciation of phonemes, or sound change; borrowing, in
which features of a language or dialect are introduced or altered as a result of
influence from another language or dialect; and analogical 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 of variation, 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
from human error or is a prescriptively discouraged 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 Lyons notes 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
English is the result of centuries of language change applying to Old 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 the Romance
languages are from Vulgar Latin, they are said to form a language family and be
"genetically" related.

2 Causes
[edit]

 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.
 o The principle of least effort 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 standard.
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 a substratum, and the
changed forms can ultimately influence majority usage.[7]
 Social prestige: A language change towards adopting features that have more
social prestige, or away from ones with negative prestige,[7] as in the case of
the loss of rhoticity in the British Received Pronunciation accent.[8] Such
movements can go back and forth.[9]

According to Guy 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]
3 Types
[edit]

4 Phonetic and phonological changes

[edit]
Main articles: Sound change and Phonological change

Sound change—i.e., change in the pronunciation of phonemes—can lead

to phonological 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 of sound recording dates only from the 19th century,
and thus sound changes before that time must be inferred from written texts.
The orthographical practices 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

the Neogrammarian school 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 a heuristic, and enabled the development of methodologies
of comparative reconstruction and internal reconstruction that allow linguists to
extrapolate backwards from known languages to the properties of earlier, unattested
languages and hypothesize sound changes that may have taken place in them.

5 Lexical changes

[edit]
Main article: Lexical innovation

The study of lexical changes forms the diachronic portion of the science
of onomasiology.
The ongoing influx of new words into 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 eventually as "archaic"
or "obsolete".

6 Spelling changes

[edit]

Standardisation of spelling originated 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 fewer literate people: languages lacked fixed systems of orthography, and the
manuscripts that survived often show words spelled according to regional
pronunciation and to personal preference.

7 Semantic changes

[edit]
Main article: Semantic change

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
the valence of 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 undergone pejoration.
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 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 English hund) 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]

8 Syntactic change

[edit]
Main article: Syntactic change

Syntactic change is the evolution of the syntactic structure of a natural language.

Over time, syntactic change is the greatest modifier of a particular language.[citation

needed]
Massive changes – attributable either to creolization or to relexification – 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]

9 Sociolinguistics
[edit]

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."[11]

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

short period in the American resort of Martha's Vineyard and 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
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.
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 of ama over fakat, 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 its prescriptive norms with 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]

10 Quantification
[edit]

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.

11 Language shift and social status

[edit]
Main article: Language shift

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 to Iceland) 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.

12 Notes
[edit]

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.
5. ^ Jump up to:Jump up to:a b The Unfolding of Language, 2005, chapter 2, esp. pp. 63, 69 and 71
6. ^ Jump up to:Jump up to:a b "The teaching of pidgin and Creole studies - LLAS Centre for
Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies". Retrieved 25 September 2016.
7. ^ Jump up to:Jump up to:a b The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1997, p. 335)
8. ^ Ben (7 October 2012). "Was Received Pronunciation Ever Rhotic?". Retrieved 25
September 2016.
9. ^ "The fall of the r-less class - Macmillan". 14 November 2011. Retrieved 25 September 2016.
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 439
16070.
13 References
[edit]
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. Retrieved 2010-03-30.
 Labov, William (1994, 2001), Principles of Linguistic Change (vol.I Internal
Factors, 1994; vol.II Social 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.

14 Further reading
[edit]

 AlBader, Yousuf B. (2015) "Semantic Innovation and Change in Kuwaiti

Arabic: A Study of the Polysemy of Verbs"
 Fridland, Valerie (2023). Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad
English. Viking. ISBN 978-0593298329.
 Greene, Lane (2018). Talk on the Wild Side: Why Language Can't Be Tamed.
The Economist. ISBN 978-1610398336.
 Hale, M. (2007), Historical linguistics: Theory and method, Oxford, Blackwell
 McWhorter, John (2017). Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't -
Sit Still (Like, Literally). Picador. ISBN 978-1250143785.

15 External links
[edit]
  Sounds Familiar? The British Library website provides audio examples of
changing accents and dialects from across the UK.

show

Historical linguistics

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United States
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