Social Factors in Language change

Social variables:

 REGIONAL BACKGROUNDS (DIALECTS)

 SOCIAL CLASS
 SEX / GENDER
 AGE
 ETHNICITY

Age
Style
Stylistic variation involves variation in the speech of individual speakers (intra-speaker variation) rather
than across groups of speakers (inter-speaker variation)
1. (intra-speaker variation
Gender
Social Class

Borrowing

Linguistic borrowing is the procces in which recipient language takes over any linguistic material
(sounds,phonological rules, grammatical morphemes, syntactic patterns, sematic associations, discourse
strategies, and lexical items) from the donor language.
 Reasons for borrowing
 Need – People need a foreign item to go along with the new acquisition. Foreign name is
borrowed along with the new concept.
 Arabic ’tabaq’ (a herb that caused euphoria) > Spanish ‘tabaco’ > Japanese ‘tabaco’,
Finnish’tupakka’, Indonesian’tembakau’, English’tobacco’.
 Prestige – the foreign term is highly esteemed due to the status of the donor language culture .
Sometimes called luxury loans.
 French ’porc, boeuf’ > English ’pork,beef’. (during the Norman French dominance, French
was considered more prestigeous than English due to its social status)
 Negative evaluation – Opposite of prestige. Much rearer reason for borrowing. Adoption of the
foreign word to be derogatory.
 Russian ’konj’ > Finnish ’koni’ . In russian neutral term for horse, in Finnish, meaning ’nag’ ,
old horse.
 Adaptation
Phoneme substitution or adaptation happens when the word which is borrowed contains sound/s
that are not part of the phonological inventory of the recipient language. These sounds are
approximated by the closest phonetic equivalents.
 Voiced stops /b,d,g/ from Germanic languages were approximated with their closest
counterparts in Finnish /p,t,k/ . Germanic *bardaz > Finnish parta (beard); gas>kaasu.

 Acommodation
Sometimes certain phonological patterns are not permitted in the borrowing language, so they are
modified to fit the phonological combinations which ARE permitted. This is usually accomplished by
deletion,addition and recombination of certain sounds to fit the structure of borrowing language.
  Swedsih Franska ’French’ > Finnish Ranska; Old Russian kristi > risti; Finnish had no initial
clusters in antive words, so all but the last consonant were eliminated
 Direct phonological diffusion
Sometimes the outcome of the borrowing varies according to the length and the intensity of the
contact. New phonemes can be introduced into the borrowing language with the new words , i.e
foreign phonemes don’t go through the process of adaptation and accomodation, but are aquired
instead. This results in the change in the phonemic inventory of borrowing language.
 Addition of the phoneme /ž/ in the English through many French loans eg. Rouge /ruž/’red’;
 Formely, English had only allophonic [v] of the phoneme /f/ in the intervocalic positions. Due in
part to French loans which did permit /v/ English acquired /v/ as a separate phoneme. However
remnants of intervocalic [v] could be still found in the words such as wife-wives.
 Formely, Finnish didn’t allow consonant clusters, but from the extensive contact with Swedish
and English, it started acquiring this phonological pattern. ’krokotiili’, ’presidentti’