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The Linguistics
of the History
of English
Remco Knooihuizen
The Linguistics of the History of English
Remco Knooihuizen
The Linguistics
of the History of English
Remco Knooihuizen
University of Groningen
Groningen, The Netherlands
ISBN 978-3-031-41691-0 ISBN 978-3-031-41692-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41692-7
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Preface
This is an introductory textbook on the history of the English language. At the

same time, it is also an introductory textbook on historical linguistics in English.
The book has as its starting point some of the major questions in the study
of language change—how do different types of language change originate and
spread?—and discusses these with a particular focus on examples from the history
of English. Compared to many other introductory textbooks, which take students
through the different stages of the English language chronologically, the focus here
is less on history and more on linguistic theory. Textual evidence is offered in sup-
port of the theoretical discussion. Text boxes on empirical studies go into more
depth on specific details, and other boxes give a more cross-linguistic perspective
by looking at comparable developments in other languages.
Although this is an introductory textbook, some prior knowledge is assumed.
Students should ideally have followed one or more introductory linguistics courses
and should be familiar with basic concepts and terminology; advanced knowledge
of linguistic theory is not required. It is also assumed that students are familiar
with the broad strokes of the history of the English language and the history of
Anglophone countries (especially England). The overview of these histories in
Chapter 1 is meant as a refresher that will bring readers up to speed, but it does
not pretend to be a comprehensive presentation.
At the end of the book, my goal is that students will be equipped with
enough theoretical and factual knowledge to conduct their own independent or
semi-independent research on topics from the history of English. They should
also be well-equipped to engage in public debate about language change and to
dispel many of the myths we see in public discourse, such as the idea that lan-
guage change entails the decay of a perfect Standard English, brought on by the
exceptionally lazy youth of today.
The textbook has been developed as teaching material over a decade of teaching
the course ‘English Language Change’ at the University of Groningen. It should
hopefully fit courses in other degree programmes equally well. My thanks go out
to many cohorts of students for their feedback on various iterations of the text,
and to many colleagues for their support. Comments from an anonymous reviewer
have been extremely helpful in clarifying the focus in some of the chapters, and in
dealing with smaller issues throughout. My own educational and research history
at the Universities of Groningen and Edinburgh is as a generalist with a focus on
v
vi Preface
Germanic languages more widely, and I have had to make myself familiar with the
norms and traditions of ‘Anglistics’ separately. I hope that this mixture of inside
and outside perspectives on the field will inspire new generations of students to
work on historical linguistics both in English and in other languages.
Groningen, The Netherlands Remco Knooihuizen

Contents
Part I Introduction
1 So What Had Happened Was . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2 Explaining Language Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Part II Sound change

3 Phonetic Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
4 Phonological Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
5 Track Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Part III Contact-Induced Change

6 Language Contact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
7 Dialect Contact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Part IV Structural Change

8 Analogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
9 Grammaticalisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
10 Syntactic Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
11 The Loss of Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
12 Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
vii
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Schematic representation of the S-curve pattern

of the spread of a linguistic change through a speech
community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Fig. 3.1 Sound changes in lenition (Adapted from Bauer 2008,
p. 686) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Fig. 4.1 Schematic representation of the Great Vowel Shift . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Fig. 4.2 The Northern Cities Shift (Adapted from Labov 1994,
p. 191) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Fig. 4.3 The Canadian Vowel Shift (Adapted from Boberg 2019,
p. 93) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Fig. 4.4 The California Vowel Shift (Adapted from Podesva et al.
2015, p. 159) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Fig. 4.5 The Southern Hemisphere Shift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Fig. 4.6 Schematic representation of the foot/strut split
and related changes, after Wells (1982, p. 199) and Turton
and Baranowski (2021, p. 166) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Fig. 4.7 Schematic representation of the trap/bath split and related
changes, after Wells (1982, pp. 232–234) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Fig. 4.8 Schematic overview of, from left to right, primary split
(trap/bath), secondary split (foot/strut), and merger
(square/nurse) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Fig. 6.1 Distribution of Scandinavian place names in England
(Adapted from Fellows-Jensen 2011, p. 70) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Fig. 6.2 Uptake of French loan words in English from the eleventh
to nineteenth centuries, based on data by Jespersen
and Baugh (Baugh 1935) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Fig. 7.1 Restructuring along a spectrum of contact varieties
(Adapted from Siegel 2001, p. 193) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
ix
x List of Figures
Fig. 10.1 Tree diagram for The black cat found cheese
from Germany in the pantry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
Fig. 10.2 Verb movement and the change from OV to VO order . . . . . . . . . 174
Fig. 10.3 A negated subordinate clause before the loss of V-to-I
movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
Fig. 10.4 A negated subordinate clause after the loss of V-to-I
movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
List of Tables
Table 3.1 Regular correspondences in five Germanic languages . . . . . . . . 35

Table 4.1 Consonant inventories in Old English, Middle English,
and Modern English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Table 4.2 Changes to the pronunciation of long vowels in the Great
Vowel Shift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Table 5.1 Sound changes in the history of the English word comb . . . . . . 72
Table 5.2 Changes to the pronunciation of long vowels in the Great
Vowel Shift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Table 6.1 Thomason and Kaufman’s borrowing scale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Table 6.2 Old English paradigms for to be: wesan and bēon . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Table 6.3 Overview of contact situations in English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Table 8.1 Paradigms for the verb ‘to choose’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Table 8.2 Strong verb classes in Old English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
Table 11.1 Cases in German . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
Table 11.2 Some examples of case patterns in Old English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Table 11.3 Comparison of case patterns in Old English and Old
Norse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
xi
Part I
Introduction
So What Had Happened Was
Fifteen Centuries of English-Language Change
1
Introduction
To make sense of the different forms that English has taken throughout its history,
it is customary to divide that history into different periods. The major divisions that
are conventionally made are Old, Middle, and Early Modern English, before we
get to present-day English. There is variation in the dates given to these different
periods, and the years given in this chapter are meant as indicative only.
The periods in the history of English are ideally defined by means of linguis-
tic characteristics. This is necessarily imprecise, as language change is a gradual
process. A medieval peasant in Kent did not go to bed one day having spoken Old
English and wake up the next day speaking Middle English; these are our own
projections, and we use different factors in deciding when one period ends and
the next starts, such as historical events, the reigns of kings or dynasties or sim-
ply round numbers. There is a lot of variation within periods, and there are many
similarities between periods as well. Ultimately, the periodisation is as much a
socio-historical as it is a linguistic decision.
The bird’s-eye view of the history of English in this chapter focuses on both
these factors: it sketches the historical context for the development of English in
the past 1500 years and gives brief illustrations of what the language looked like
in the different periods. The illustrations are based on a short bible passage (Luke
9: 12–17) as the bible is a text that has been translated many times at different
periods in the history of English, and we can therefore easily compare the forms
of the language at different times. Neither the socio-historical nor the linguistic
overview aim to be exhaustive. They serve as background for the discussion later
in the book of the processes by which English has changed.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 3

R. Knooihuizen, The Linguistics of the History of English,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41692-7_1
4 1 So What Had Happened Was
Old English (500–1150)
Socio-Historical Context
The Romans were gone, to begin with.

The Old English period starts shortly after the settlement of Angles, Saxons, and
Jutes in England from the mid-fifth century. These were Germanic peoples stem-
ming from the coastal areas of what is now the Netherlands, northern Germany,
and southern Denmark. Their settlement in England is part of a period of large-
scale migrations within Europe surrounding the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
There is debate among historians about the number of settlers, with estimates
ranging from 20,000 to as high as 200,000 (Ward-Perkins 2000, p. 524).
The Germanic settlers did not arrive in an unpopulated country, of course. The
Roman occupation of Britain may have ended in 410 AD—some of the earliest
Germanic settlers may have encountered some Roman stragglers—but there was a
native Celtic population, the Britons, still in place. The exact interactions between
the Germanic settlers and the Britons are unclear because of a lack of historical
sources, but what is clear is that from the earliest history of English, the language
developed in a situation of language contact (see section “Influence from Celtic
Languages” in Chapter 6).
The settlers spoke different Germanic dialects that over time coalesced into
a variety that was distinct and ‘English’ (see Chapter 7 for a discussion of this
process). We have very few sources for the earliest forms of Old English. Most
manuscript evidence dates from the ninth century onwards, by which time we
can already distinguish a number of regional dialects: Mercian, Northumbrian,
Anglian, and West Saxon. This last dialect was the most prominent and at times
served as a sort of standard written language—both because the kingdom of
Wessex was relatively powerful and because a lot of West Saxon material was
written and subsequently copied, also in other parts of England (Timofeeva 2022,
pp. 175–176). This does not imply the uniformity of language that the concept of
a ‘standard’ suggests today, however. Although some features show almost com-
plete uniformity (Faulkner 2020), the variation found in written texts is enough that
Timofeeva (2022) could successfully use sociolinguistic methodology to uncover
the influence of social networks and communities of practice on the language in
this period.
Despite the political fragmentation into smaller kingdoms, the term the people
of early medieval England used for themselves and their language was Englisċ
or Ænglisċ: simply ‘English’. The appearance of the term ‘English’ suggests that
regardless of political allegiance, the people came to see themselves as speakers
of the same language no later than the early eighth century (Smyth 1998).1
1 The terminology surrounding language and culture in early medieval England has been subject
to heavily debated change over the years. The term Anglo-Saxon has long been used to refer to the
language, culture, and people at the time. However, in public discourse in some Anglophone groups
the term has developed connotations with a racialised imagined indigenous heritage in Britain,
Old English (500–1150) 5
There are two further historical developments that led to language contact in
the Old English period. The first of these is the Christianisation of England in the
seventh century. Initiated by Pope Gregory I in 597, this process ended with most
royalty and nobility being converted before 700. The church used a good deal of
Latin terminology, which was borrowed into Old English (see section “Influence
from Latin” in Chapter 6).
The other language contact situation involved Vikings, who invaded England
regularly from the eighth century (e.g., the raid on the monastery of Lindisfarne in
793) and who settled in the north of England from the ninth century. By 878, much
of Northern England was under Viking control. Although armed conflict contin-
ued until the eleventh century, Viking settlers and the already existing English
population co-existed and mixed during these centuries (Hadley 2000, pp. 1–17).
The Vikings spoke Old Norse, a language closely related to Old English, which
brought with it a particular type of language contact (section “Influence from Old
Norse” in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7). The Old Norse influence on Old English is
therefore extensive but difficult to see.
The conquest of England by the Normans, starting in 1066, is the beginning of
the end for the Old English period. A changing sociolinguistic status and increased
contact with French changed the language almost beyond recognition. The result
of that process is generally seen as Middle English.
Linguistic Sketch
Old English was characterised by an almost exclusively Germanic lexicon, which

makes it very difficult for speakers of present-day English to read. It also had a
very extensive inflectional system, with many different case endings for nouns and
adjectives and different verb endings to indicate person, number, tense, etc. This
is exemplified by the translation of the bible fragment from the Wessex Gospels,
written around 990:
12 Þa geƿ at se dæg forð. 7 hig tƿ elfe him genealæhton 7 sædon him; Læt þas menego þ̄ hig
farun on þas castelu 7 on þas tunas þe her abutan synt: 7 him mete findon. forþam þe ƿ e synt
her on ƿ estere stōƿ e; 13 Ða cƿ æð he to him. sylle ge him etan; Ða cƿ æðon hı̄g ƿ e nabbað
buton fı̄f hlafas 7 tƿ egen fixas. buton ƿ e gan 7 ūs mete bicgon 7 eallum þissum ƿ erede; 14
Þar ƿ æron neah fif þusenda ƿ era; Ða cƿ æþ he to his leorningcnihtun: Doþ þ̄ hig sitton. þurh
gebeorscypas fiftegum. 15 7 hig sƿ a dydon 7 hi ealle sæton; 16 Ða nam he þa fı̄f hlafas 7 þa
tƿ egen fixas. 7 on þone heofon beseah 7 bletsude hig 7 breac. 7 dælde his leorningcnihtum.
which has led to the term being seen as exclusionary. The International Society of Anglo-Saxonists
changed their name to International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England in 2019 in
response to these connotations. The term Old English, which is the term used in this book, had ear-
lier already been used for the language only: Anglo-Saxon people spoke Old English. This term
is sometimes criticised because it is felt to over-emphasise the continuity between Old and Mid-
dle English, for many of the same reasons of imagined heritage (see Watts, 2011, pp. 30–32, for a
discussion).
17 Þa æton hig ealle 7 ƿ urdon gefyllede. 7 man nam þa gebrotu þe þar belifon tƿ elf cypan
fulle;
The most obvious thing about this passage is the use of letters we no longer use
in English today: <æ> (which represented the vowel /æ/), <þ> and <ð> (which both
interchangeably represented the dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/), and <ƿ > (which stands
for the consonant /w/). There are also two frequent abbreviations: <þ̄> stands for
þæt ‘that’, and <7> stands for and ‘and’.
There are many words in the fragment that are no longer used in English today:
forþġewı̄tan ‘to proceed’, ġenēalǣċan ‘to approach’, and ġebēorsċip ‘company’
(literally ‘beer-ship’) are some of the most striking ones.2 Others have only a
residual existence or a different meaning in present-day English, such as stōw
‘place’ (in stowaway), wer ‘man’ (in werewolf ), cȳpa ‘basket’ (now coop ‘hen-
house’), and mete ‘food’ (not just ‘flesh’). And we see compound words typical
of Old English, such as leorning-cniht ‘disciple’ (literally ‘learning-knight’). It is
no coincidence that the vast majority of present-day English translations of these
words are Romance loanwords, but in the Old English period, these were very few
and far between, with only castel ‘castle, town’ in this fragment.
The fragment also shows evidence of the case system of Old English: compare
eallum (a dative form for the indirect object) in verse 13 with ealla (a nominative
form for the subject) in verses 15 and 17. Verb inflection was much more extensive
than today, as can be seen from he cwæþ ‘he said’ (v. 13) and hı̄e cwæþon ‘they
said’ (v. 13). All these inflectional endings showed a variety of unstressed vowels:
<a>, <e>, <o>, and <u> in this text. The pronoun they is hı̄e (spelled hi, hig or hı̄g in
the fragment; dative him) with an initial h-.
The syntactic structure of Old English is more difficult to glean from the
untranslated passage, but the differences can be seen in the glossed version of
v. 12 in (1):
(1) Þa geƿ at se dæg forð. and hig tƿ elfe him genealæhton and sædon him; Læt þas menego
þæt hig farun on þas castelu and on þas tunas þe her abutan synt: and him mete findon.
forþam þe ƿ e synt her on ƿ estere stōƿ e;
Then went the day forth and they twelve him approached and said him Let the crowds
that they go to the castle and to the towns that here about are and them food find because
that we are here on desert place
‘Then the day proceeded, and the twelve of them approached him and said to him, “Let
the crowds (go), so that they go to the castle and the towns that are around here, and find
them food, because were are in a deserted place.’
2 Examples in the text are given in a standardised dictionary reference form of Old English, and
therefore differ slightly from the forms that are found in the fragment.
Middle English (1150–1500) 7
The two most striking syntactic features in this sentence are the position of the
verb last in the relative clause þe hēr abūtan sind ‘that are about here’, and the
place of the indirect object him ‘him’ before rather than after the verb ġenēalǣhton
‘approached’.
All in all, Old English was a very different type of language from present-day
English. Speakers of other Germanic languages often find it slightly easier (but
still difficult!) to read a text in Old English than speakers of English who do not
speak another Germanic language. The changes that would turn Old English into
Middle English meant that a lot of Germanic vocabulary was lost, as well as some
grammatical features that Old English shared with other Germanic languages.
Middle English (1150–1500)
The Norman Conquest of 1066 brought about considerable change. The ensuing
migration of Norman French speakers was not at an incredibly large scale, but they
did take up key leadership positions, essentially replacing the existing nobility.
The courts became Francophone, with English being relegated to the lower social
classes. But just as there was no population replacement after 1066, there was no
language shift either: everyone continued to speak their own language, Norman
French for the elites or English for the common man, with bilingualism restricted
to those people whose professions meant they had to deal with both population
groups (see section “Influence from French” in Chapter 6).
English played second fiddle to French for two to three centuries. In the thir-
teenth, and especially in the fourteenth century, however, we see that the balance
shifts again in favour of English. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that
the political relations between England and France became increasingly difficult.
The continental possessions of the English king were lost under John Lackland in
the early thirteenth century, although contacts of course remained. The Hundred
Years War (1337–1453) between England and France, however, did much to whip
up anti-French sentiment and nudge the anglicisation of the elites. Another rea-
son is the Black Death of 1349. Mass death and population decline caused labour
shortages, which meant that the Anglophone working classes held a stronger social
position. The same can be said for the emergent merchant middle class.
The demise of French and the emancipation of English can be seen in the rein-
statement of English as the language of the law (in the Statute of Pleading, 1362)
and of official government (under Henry V, r. 1413–1422). There was also a revival
of English-language literature in this period. Most of the English writing since the
Norman Conquest had been religious in nature—while French was the language of
government, religion had continued as an English-language domain—but the four-
teenth century saw literary highlights as Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales)
and William Langland (Piers Plowman), as well as an English bible translation by
John Wycliffe.
Some changes in the language are visible in the language already shortly after
the Norman Conquest in 1066. We can partly explain these by scribes no longer
being educated in the West Saxon pseudo-standard, so that they would once again
write the language as they would speak it. Some of this, therefore, reflects changes
that had already happened, and that only appeared in manuscripts with some delay,
and not anything to do with Norman French influence. By the end of this period,
we again see an increasing standardisation of the language, based on the dialect of
the most populous region, the East Midlands, and especially the capital, London.
The introduction of the printing press in the 1470s drastically accelerated this
development.
Linguistic Sketch
Over time, the Old English inflections were simplified and mostly eroded away.
The language that we call Middle English, then, has far fewer inflections, and as a
consequence of that, a more fixed word order. There are also significant changes in
its lexicon. In the Early Middle English period, the lexicon was still predominantly
Germanic, although there had been many Old Norse loanwords due to the Viking
settlements in the North of England in the ninth and tenth centuries. But by the
Late Middle English period, the lexicon had changed profoundly, and many Old
English words had been replaced by loanwords from French (or more properly,
Anglo-Norman). This is illustrated by the bible translation by John Wycliffe (c.
1380):
12 And the dai bigan to bowe doun, and the twelue camen, and seiden to hym, Leeue the
puple, that thei go, and turne in to castels and townes, that ben aboute, that thei fynde mete,
for we ben here in a desert place. 13 And he seide to hem, Yue ye to hem to ete. And thei
seiden, Ther ben not to vs mo than fyue looues and twei fischis, but perauenture that we
go, and bie meetis to al this puple. 14 And the men weren almost fyue thousynde. And he
seide to hise disciplis, Make ye hem sitte to mete bi cumpanyes, a fifti to gidir. 15 And thei
diden so, and thei maden alle men sitte to mete. 16 And whanne he hadde take the fyue
looues and twei fischis, he biheeld in to heuene, and blesside hem, and brak, and delide to
hise disciplis, that thei schulden sette forth bifor the cumpanyes. 17 And alle men eeten, and
weren fulfillid; and that that lefte to hem of brokun metis was takun vp, twelue cofyns.
The lexical developments are probably the most striking in this passage:
puple ‘people’, desert, place, peraventure ‘maybe’, disciples, cumpanyes, cofyns
‘coffins’, … These are all French loanwords that in some cases was simply added
to the lexicon, but also very often entirely replaced the Germanic words from Old
English.
The majority of morphological endings had disappeared, and what remained
was spelled with an <e>, which suggests a pronunciation with /∂/. The endings
may even no longer have been pronounced at all. There is no longer any evidence
of case, apart from in the pronominal system—where in this fragment, the subject
form they had been introduced, but the object form was still hem. The only remnant
Early Modern English (1500–1700) 9
of verbal morphology is the plural ending {-en} in the past tense (camen, seiden,
weren, etc.) but not in the present (turne, finde; but ben ‘are’).
The syntax in this passage does not strike a modern reader as very odd. Subor-
dinate clauses are no longer verb-final, and constituent order is more or less fixed
as it is in present-day English. This means that the greatest amount of syntactic
change happened in the transition from Old to Middle English.
Early Modern English (1500–1700)
The Early Modern period, the period of the Renaissance, saw another emancipa-
tion of English. This time it was not an emancipation from French, but English
joined in a European-wide process in which vernacular languages took over func-
tions from Latin, in particular in religion (driven by the Reformation) and science
(Burke 2004). In order to be able to use English in these new domains, the lan-
guage needed to expand its vocabulary significantly. This meant that there were
many Latin loanwords, so many in fact that there was an ultimately unsuccessful
puristic pushback. These Latin loanwords often ended up in higher, more for-
mal registers. This leaves us with a number of English-French-Latin triplets of
increasing formality, e.g., kingly, royal, regal.
In this period, the written language is becoming much more standardised in both
spelling and grammar, partly as a result of the introduction of the printing press,
a growing market for books, and the authoritative bible translation commissioned
by King James VI and I (1611). This means that it becomes more difficult to
spot language change as it happens in the many documents we have from this
period. Many private documents survive from this period as well, however, and
they do allow for a more detailed tracking of changes in progress (Nevalainen and
Raumolin-Brunberg 2003).
An important development is that this period sees the beginning of nation build-
ing, although perhaps with a less strong ideological link between language and
nation than we come to see from the nineteenth century onwards (Anderson 2006;
Burke 2004, pp. 160–172). We also see the first contours of a growing British
Empire, with settlement colonies in North America from the early seventeenth
century. Although these colonies at first retained close connections to Britain,
they soon grew, became increasingly self-sufficient, and developed social group
identities separate from those in the British Isles.3 This meant that we can see
the beginnings of growing numbers of varieties of English, which develop along
separate paths.
3 The colonisation of Ireland from the twelfth century, and the incorporation of Scotland and Eng-
land under one ruler in 1603, were earlier beginnings of Empire. The smaller distance and closer
connections, however, meant that the dynamics of development of these new varieties of English
were different from those in the Early Modern period and later.
Linguistic Sketch
The form of English in the Early Modern period can be exemplified by this frag-
ment from the Geneva Bible (1560). This is relatively early in the period; the
translation pre-dates the King James Version by about fifty years, and is less than
200 years younger than the Late Middle English translation by Wycliffe.
12 And when the day began to weare away, the twelue came, and sayd vnto him, Sende the
people away, that they may goe into the townes and villages round about, and lodge, and
get meate: for we are here in a desart place. 13 But he sayd vnto them, Giue ye them to
eate. And they sayd, We haue no more but fiue loaues and two fishes, except we should go
and buy meate for all this people. 14 For they were about fiue thousand men. Then he sayde
to his disciples, Cause them to sit downe by fifties in a company. 15 And they did so, and
caused all to sit downe. 16 Then he tooke the fiue loaues, and the two fishes, and looked vp
to heauen, and blessed them, and brake, and gaue to the disciples, to set before the people.
17 So they did all eate, and were satisfied: and there was taken vp of that remained to them,
twelue baskets full of broken meate.
We can see that the last remaining verb endings have disappeared: came and sayd
for earlier camen and seiden. The spelling in this fragment is considerably closer
to what we are used to today: the only major difference is the distribution of <v>
word-initially and <u> elsewhere, where present-day English has reassigned these
symbols to represent a consonant and a vowel, respectively. The fragment also
sometimes uses <y> where we would write <i>. Finally, there are still some cases
of <e> at the end of words, but these were almost certainly not pronounced.
What we cannot learn from the spelling itself, but what is clear from meta-
linguistic comments as well as rhyming patterns in the literature, is that English
underwent a significant change in the pronunciation of long vowels, known as
the Great Vowel Shift. This sound change has been given almost mythical status,
perhaps undeservedly so (see section “The Great Vowel Shift” in Chapter 4). It is,
however, one of the earliest examples in English of a standardised spelling system
obscuring a major sound change.
In addition to this change in the phonology, there are also a few important
grammatical changes in this period. One is the introduction of the auxiliary verb
do in questions, negations, and emphatic statements. In the early stages of this
change, it was also used in simple affirmative statements, as in they did all eat
(v. 17), but it disappeared from those contexts again before the usage had gained
currency.
Another change, which unfortunately is not exemplified in the fragment, is
the disappearance of the informal second-person singular pronoun thou. This was
replaced by the second-person plural pronoun ye (see v. 13), which was also used
to address individuals in more formal contexts. The form ye itself was eventually
replaced by you, originally the object form of the pronoun. The singular pronoun
thou was still in regular use when the King James Version of the bible was trans-
lated. According to the conventions of the time, informal thou was the appropriate
form to address God by, as it indexed trust, intimacy, and affection. Now that we
Late Modern English (1700–Now) 11
no longer use thou, the archaic and formal nature of the KJV has given the pronoun
an air of formality that is completely anachronistic.
Research Highlight
CONTACT AND CHAOS CAUSE CHANGE
Language change is inevitable, but different languages change at different
speeds, and the rate of change can also change at different time periods in
the history of a single language. Linguists have been trying to find out what
causes these differences.
One explanation is that languages with less drastic change tend to be
geographically isolated. The Old Norse spoken around the year 1000 was
roughly the same across all of Scandinavia, but if we look at present-day
Scandinavian languages, geographically remote Icelandic is much more sim-
ilar to Old Norse than Danish, spoken close to the European heartland, is.
Within Norwegian and Swedish, it is the dialects spoken in more isolated
valleys that retain archaic features like the dative case.
The driver of change in this scenario is language contact, in particular
contact scenarios that involve adult learners of the language. Trudgill (2012)
has argued that complex features disappear in adult second-language acqui-
sition, and he posits that this sociolinguistic situation may also lead to faster
language change (Trudgill 2020).
Another explanation is that language change accelerates in situations of
social upheaval. This view sees language as a ‘punctuated equilibrium’: it is
roughly stable until some event disturbs the balance and a lot of language
change happens suddenly. This would explain why there was rapid change in
English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—caused by the Black Death
and the Hundred Years’ War—but relative stability in the eighteenth century
(Trudgill 2020, p. 8). An analysis of language change across many features in
Middle and Early Modern English suggests that there are indeed periods of
rapid change that can be temporally linked to major social events. In addition
to the Black Death and the Hundred Years’ War, the Norman Conquest also
triggered a period of rapid language change. With social upheaval as well as
language contact, how could it not have?
Late Modern English (1700–Now)
The standardisation processes that were initiated in the Early Modern period con-
tinued into the most recent period, which despite its fairly long time span we will
call Late Modern English, or sometimes ‘present-day’ English. In particular the
eighteenth century was an important time for standardisation, with the publication
of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and, at least as

importantly, a whole host of grammars and elocution manuals which promoted
the prestigious standard or ‘polite’ language to the growing, upwardly mobile
and increasingly literate and educated middle classes (Watts 2011, pp. 204–206).
For the first time, we see an organised effort to decrease linguistic diversity and
change. This prescriptivist movement has greatly influenced people’s attitudes to
language, and although linguists typically favour a descriptive approach, the strong
standard language ideology that prescriptivism has engendered may even have to
power to itself change people’s language habits (Curzan 2014).
The United Kingdom was also the earliest location of the Industrial Revolu-
tion, which led to the urbanisation of settlement patterns; this meant more people
speaking fewer distinct varieties of English. Easier communication between urban
centres, first by rail, later by road, air, or by ever increasing telecommunication
technologies, facilitates contact, which is a force for linguistic homogeneisation as
well. On the other hand, Anglophone mediatised culture and education has also
created more and more localised second-language varieties of English, each with
their own characteristics (see section “English as a Lingua Franca” in Chapter 7).
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also saw a marked increase in colonisa-
tion efforts. Settlement colonies were established in South Africa, Australia, New
Zealand, and a number of smaller locations; the predominantly British migrants
to these colonies in time developed their own varieties of English (see section
“New-Dialect Formation in Colonial Englishes” in Chapter 7). The same is true
for the extraction colonies set up in this period in Africa, South and South East
Asia, and the Caribbean, where the number of British settlers was smaller, but
where they did take control of government, the economy, and education. The slave
trade, predominantly but not exclusively across the Atlantic Ocean, led to many
enslaved people from Africa being displaced to the Americas, where they devel-
oped English-lexifier creoles (see section “Koinéisation in Creole Languages” in
Chapter 7). Empire, therefore, was a force for linguistic diversification.
The keyword in this most recent period, then, is contact; but whether the contact
results in greater or lesser linguistic diversity depends on the individual circum-
stances. The differences between varieties of English give us many clues about
how English must have changed in the past few centuries, and also tell us a lot
about how language changes in general.
Linguistic Sketch
The standardisation of spelling and grammar also makes it difficult to trace lan-
guage change in the period since 1700, although more and more work is being
done on informal private letters and (in the past twenty years) social media posts,
which can show a much more variable and fragmented picture of language in this
period. While none of the language from c. 1700 and later will look exceptionally
strange to us, there are constant small incremental changes so that a more recent
bible translation still looks different from the Early Modern version.
Sources for English Historical Linguistics 13
12 The day was drawing to a close, when the twelve came up to him, and said, “Send the
crowd away, so that they may make their way to the villages and farms around about, and
find themselves lodgings and provisions, for we are in a lonely spot here.” 13 But Jesus said,
“It is for you to give them something to eat.” “We have not more than five loaves and two
fish,” they answered. “Unless indeed we are to go and buy food for all these people.” 14 (For
the men among them were about five thousand.) “Get them seated in companies,” was his
reply, “about fifty in each.” 15 This they did, and got all the people seated. 16 Taking the five
loaves and the two fish, Jesus looked up to heaven and said the blessing over them. Then he
broke them in pieces, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people. 17 Everyone
had sufficient to eat, and what was left of the broken pieces was picked up – twelve baskets.
This translation, from the Open English Bible (2010), is in a relatively formal
register which alludes to the language from Early Modern translations. In addition
to the standardised spelling, it is therefore difficult to spot language change in this
fragment. The only clear change is that the plural fishes has been replaced by fish;
but this is a detail in the grand scheme of things. But it would be a mistake to
say that there has been little to no language change in English since the 1700s!
There have been major changes in phonology (see Chapter 5), as well as more
subtle changes in morphology (e.g., the development of new second-person plural
pronouns as y’all and you guys to disambiguate the multiple meanings of you)
and in syntax (e.g., the development of the going to future marker, or the be like
quotative marker). We will revisit some of these in later chapters.
Sources for English Historical Linguistics
If we want to study language change in the history of English, we have to start

with the linguistic facts. The Bible passages in this chapter do a decent enough
job illustrating the major differences between the forms of English in different
periods, but we will typically want to look beyond them for a more in-depth study
into specific changes. If nothing else, a wider scope allows us to investigate more
linguistic contexts, as well as social and genre effects. This section will give a
brief overview of sources that have been used in the systematic study of English-
language change. There are of course a great many sources, and this overview
simply cannot be anywhere near comprehensive; it does, however, aim to cover
some of the more widely-used sources and source types, many of which are freely
available online.
A good starting point are dictionaries, chief among them the Oxford English
Dictionary (https://oed.com/). The OED offers an overview of the development
of forms and meanings for each lemma, with many examples from a variety of
sources. To this we can add dictionaries of specific varieties of English such as
A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) and The Scottish National Dic-
tionary (snd, both at Dictionaries of the Scots Language, https://dsl.ac.uk/), the
Dictionary of American Regional Englishes (DARE, https://www.daredictionary.
com/, see Adams 2013), the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles
(DCHP-2, https://www.dchp.ca/dchp2/, see Dollinger 2022). Such sources allow
us to chart, for example, the uptake of words from Aboriginal languages in the
Australian National Dictionary (Dixon 2008), or the lexical influence of German
on American English in regions with a high proportion of German immigrants (von
Schneidemesser 2002, on the basis of DARE). For Old English, the online version
of Bosworth Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Bosworth et al. 2014, https://bos
worthtoller.com/) offers many examples and links to primary sources.
Linguistic atlases are another good set of sources. Three major atlas projects
from the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Historical Dialectology (now the
Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics, http://www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/)
deserve particular attention: the electronic version of the Linguistic Atlas of Early
Middle English (eLAEME), the Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English (LALME),
and the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots (LAOS). These are based on large collec-
tions of diplomatically transcribed manuscripts and have greatly helped the study
of earlier stages of English since the first inception of laeme in the 1950s. Among
the linguistic atlases for more recent stages of the language, we can mention those
based on the 1950s Survey of English Dialects (SED): The Linguistic Atlas of
England (Orton et al. 1978) and An Atlas of English Dialects (Upton and Widdow-
son 2006). The Atlas of North American English (Labov et al. 2006) is based on
telephone surveys from the 1990s.
For primary research, the most useful tool are corpora: searchable collections
of texts or, in more recent times, speech recordings. Many of the dictionaries and
atlases mentioned above also give access to the underlying corpora, in addition to
providing more processed and ready-made interpretations. Two corpora from the
University of Helsinki have been extremely informative for our understanding of
language change in English. The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (led by Matti
Rissanen) contains texts from c. 730 to 1710, and the Corpus of Early English
Correspondence (led by Terttu Nevalainen) spans the period from 1400 to 1800.
Information on both corpora can be found at https://varieng.helsinki.fi/CoRD/. Cor-
pora of legal proceedings also provide a good record of variation in written orality,
e.g., the Old Bailey Corpus (1720–1913; Huber et al. 2016), An Electronic Text Edi-
tion of Depositions 1560–1760 (Kytö et al. 2011), and the Records of the Salem
Witch-Hunt (Rosenthal 2009; Grund 2021).
Widely-used corpora of contemporary English are available at https://www.
english-corpora.org/: the British National Corpus (BNC, 100 million words from
the 1980s and 1990s), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA,
one billion words from 1990 to 2019), the Corpus of Global Web-based English
(GloWbE, 1.9 billion words from the 2010s), and more. The Vienna-Oxford Inter-
national Corpus of English (VOICE 2021) focuses on English as a Lingua Franca
(see section “English as a Lingua Franca” in Chapter 7), with linguistic produc-
tion of non-native speakers of English. Although not publicly available, William
Labov’s Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus (see Labov et al. 2013, pp. 33–34
for details) also merits a mention here: it was primarily recorded over a span of
more than 40 years by Labov’s students, each adding to the corpus as part of their
coursework.
References 15
All in all, English is an extremely high-resource language, with many corpora

and an excellent research infrastructure in place even for the oldest stages of the
language.
From Sources to Explanations
This first chapter has given a general overview of the development of the English
language in the c. 1500 years from the settlement of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in
England to its current status as the default international language. It was of course
impossible to chart every single change in detail; it is clear that there has been a
major restructuring of the language’s lexicon, phonology, morphology, and syntax.
The socio-historical context for these changes has often been one of social flux and
of contact—between English and other languages, or between different varieties
of English.
But the purpose of this book is not to describe individual changes in English,
but rather to focus more on the general linguistic processes by which these changes
can be explained. Part II of the book deals explanations for sound change, both
on the phonetic level of pronunciations and on the phonological level of sound
systems. Part III discusses theory of contact-induced change, with an account of
various language and dialect contact situations in the history of English. Part IV,
finally, focuses on structural change in the language, with potential explanations
for changes in morphology and syntax.
This introductory Part I continues in the next chapter with an exploration of
what it means to find an explanation for language change, and where such answers
may be found.
References
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https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2413957.
Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of
nationalism, 2nd ed. London: Verso.
Bosworth, Joseph, Thomas Northcote Toller, Christ Sean, and Ondřej Tichy, eds. 2014. An Anglo-
Saxon dictionary online. Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University. https://bosworthtoller.
com/.
Burke, Peter. 2004. Languages and communities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Curzan, Anne. 2014. Fixing English: Prescriptivism and language history. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139107327.
Dixon, R.M.W. 2008. Australian aboriginal words in dictionaries: A history. International Journal
of Lexicography 21 (2): 129–152. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/ecn008.
Dollinger, Stefan. 2022. Canadian English lexis and semantics: A historical-comparative resource
in contrastive, real-time perspective, 1683–2016. In Earlier North American Englishes, ed.
Merja Kytö and Lucia Siebers, 205–230. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.
g66.09dol.
Faulkner, Mark. 2020. Quantifying the consistency of “standard” Old English spelling. Transac-
tions of the Philological Society 118 (1): 192–205. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.12182.
Grund, Peter J. 2021. The sociopragmatics of stance: Community, language, and the witness
depositions from the Salem witch trials. Amsterdam: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbn
s.329.
Hadley, Dawn M. 2000. The Northern Danelaw: Its social structure, c. 800–1100. London:
Leicester University Press.
Huber, Magnus, Magnus Nissel, and Karin Puga. 2016. Old Bailey corpus 2.0. http://hdl.handle.
net/11858/00-246C-0000-0023-8CFB-2.
Kytö, Merja, Peter J. Grund, and Terry Walker. 2011. Testifying to language and life in Early
Modern England. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg. 2006. The Atlas of North American English:
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9783110167467.
Labov, William, Ingrid Rosenfelder, and Josef Fruehwald. 2013. One hundred years of sound
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65.
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Explaining Language Change
How Change Starts and Spreads
2
Introduction
The approach in this book is to take the facts of language change in the history of
English as a starting point for an exploration of why the language changed. How
did we get from one stage of the language to another? What kinds of language
changes do we encounter, and how do they come about or take root? The socio-
historical context of language change is definitely very important here, but we also
need to look at the machinery of language change and find out how we ended up
where we are now.
One thing that is important to realise is that we could just as well have ended
up with a version of the English language that looked completely different. Espe-
cially the older and more established textbooks on the history of English present
that history as a process that inevitably results in Received Pronunciation (RP) or
Standard Southern British English (SSBE). This is called a teleological approach
(from Greek télos ‘purpose’): the idea that natural occurrences can be explained
through purposeful design. But in fact, even if there are strong tendencies in how
language change works, in the end it operates fairly randomly. We can even see
this within English, as there are many varieties of English that are not SSBE. It
would be quite a coincidence if language change had missed its pre-defined tar-
get for almost all speakers of the language except a politically powerful privately
educated elite in the south of England…
Broadly speaking, the study of language change can be captured in two over-
arching questions. The first is how language change starts; this is known as the
actuation question. The second is how language change spreads; this is variably
known as the transition question (Weinreich et al. 1968, p. 101), the implementa-
tion question (Trask 1997, p. 281), or the propagation question (Croft 2000, p. 5).
These questions have kept linguists busy since the establishment of linguistics as
a modern science a century and a half ago. We are going to tackle them here,
starting with the easier one before we move to the more difficult one.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41692-7_2
18 2 Explaining Language Change
Throughout the book we will be looking at individual changes from the history
of English to exemplify the linguistic processes under discussion, with the tacit
understanding that these examples may be extrapolated to other, similar cases.
This may seem risky: can a discussion of a change in twentieth-century Australian
English really inform our view of a different change that took place in twelfth-
century England? But according to the uniformitarian principle (Labov 1994,
p. 22), it is possible to use our knowledge of language variation and change in the
present to shed light on similar processes in the past. After all, there is no reason
to believe that the physiology or cognition of past speakers were meaningfully
different from those of present-day speakers, and for all the social change over the
centuries there has been ‘English’, human social relations are also underlyingly
very similar to what they once were. This means that whatever present-speakers
do, past speakers may also have done, and an extrapolation of current studies to
past situations has more advantages than it has disadvantages.
The Spread of Language Change
The question of how language change spreads is comparatively easy, because we

are dealing with an observable phenomenon. Whether we are looking at a new
word, a new syntactic construction, or a change in pronunciation, it is theoretically
possible to chart each use of the innovation: who uses it, where are they, and when
are they? This way we can see a language change spread through a society, through
space, and through time. Some studies using (geo-tagged and timestamped) data
from social media can do this in a very detailed way, charting change through
geographical areas (e.g., Grieve et al. 2018, 2019).
In the time before big data and computational linguistics, however, there were
already theories about how language change spread. These were modelled in the
form of trees or waves.
Trees
One of the better-known visualisations in historical linguistics is that of language

family trees. The analogy with family trees is intentional and pervasive: what these
trees purport to show are the ‘genetic’ relationships between languages. We talk
about ‘mother’, ‘daughter’, and ‘sister’ languages. For example, Old Norse is the
‘mother language’ of the modern Scandinavian languages, and English and Frisian
are ‘sisters’. Persian and Armenian are some of the ‘cousins’ of English, whereas
Turkish and Arabic belong to different families altogether.
The defining points in the tree model are splits, break-away moments when
a group of languages undergo a change that other, related languages do not
undergo. The defining change for Germanic languages (the language sub-family
that English belongs to, together with German, Dutch, Frisian, and the Scandi-
navian languages) was the (First) Germanic Consonant Shift, or Grimm’s Law; a
The Spread of Language Change 19
change that took place only in this set of languages some two millennia ago (see
section “Neogrammarian Change” in Chapter 3).
The splits in the tree model are not only linguistic, but also to some extent
demographic. The reasons why some languages did and other languages did not
undergo a change—or rather, why some groups of speakers did and other groups
of speakers did not—is that they must have split off from an earlier group, lost
contact, and continued developing the language in separate ways. There is some
evidence for this in the geographical patterning of language (sub-) families, as
more closely related languages are often spoken in areas close to each other. In
the context of the nineteenth century, when this theory was developed, the ideal
of coherent nations that shared a common language also supported the model of
trees and splits. However, the tree model is an abstraction and does not take into
account the smaller nuances of variation in humans and language. Essentialising
the family relationships between languages and, by extension, population groups
can have far-reaching consequences, as the misuse of this view of language and
history in the Third Reich shows (Hutton 1999).
Language family trees function fairly well as a broad-strokes model for the
ancient history of languages, to the extent that we can know this. But there are
also aspects of language change that cannot be captured in an approach that relies
entirely on diverging populations. Take Frisian, for example, a Germanic language
spoken in the northern Netherlands. If we look at the earliest history of the lan-
guage, Frisian shares many developments with English; this is why it is often
regarded as the closest relative of English. But if we look at what the language
looks like now, Frisian looks a lot more like Dutch than like English, as a result
of centuries of more or less intensive contact with Dutch after the initial split
from English. The tree analogy cannot account for this. Similarly, Norwegian
is often given an intermediate position between (older) West Scandinavian and
(newer) East Scandinavian, because of centuries of intensive contact with Danish.
Even without that contact, the transitions between Norwegian (West Scandinavian)
and Swedish (East Scandinavian) dialects are much more gradual than the all-or-
nothing splits-based tree model would dictate. The tree model also fails to account
for the large proportion of Romance-origin words in the English lexicon. English
is (correctly) seen as a Germanic language, but a pure splitting account cannot
explain why so many English words look more like French and Latin than like
German, Dutch, or Danish.
Waves
A contemporary rival for the family tree model is the wave model. This model
visualises the geographical spread of language change as waves in a pond, rippling
out from the centre if you throw a stone in the water. (Seismic waves from an
earthquake epicentre would be an equivalent but less rustic metaphor.) Of course
these do not need to be pure concentric circles as there might be obstacles in the
way, such as bodies of water, mountain ridges, marshland, or social barriers to

communication.
The maximum geographical extent of a linguistic feature is bounded by a lin-
guistic boundary or isogloss. Sometimes we have bundles of isoglosses running
closely together in the same area, which would give us good reason to conceptu-
alise a ‘language’ boundary in that area, but just as often isoglosses go across
language boundaries. There are several features that Norwegian dialects share
with Swedish dialects, but not with other Norwegian dialects, for example. As
an extreme example, there are several features (e.g., the use of a definite arti-
cle suffix) that are shared by Romanian, Bulgarian, and Albanian, languages that
belong to different sub-families but which are spoken in a contiguous area in the
Balkans.
The wave model, therefore, emphasises contact over genetic similarity. Because
of its reliance on geography, it is less able to deal with migration and other popu-
lation upheaval: it cannot account for the differences between colonial varieties of
English, and that it works so well for Germanic and Romance languages is mainly
because these populations have been relatively sedentary since the migration period
of the fourth to sixth centuries.
Dialectological research from the second half of the twentieth century showed
that the waves-in-a-pond metaphor for the geographical spread of language change
was inaccurate. Changes would spread from one large population centre to another
large population centre, skipping the more sparsely populated area in between.
The smaller towns and countryside would adopt a change only after it had already
been firmly established in the nearby larger towns. Dialectologists Peter Trudgill
and Jack Chambers even attempted to catch this city-hopping pattern, or ‘grav-
ity model’, in a mathematical formula (Chambers and Trudgill 1998, p. 179).
According to the model, the linguistic influence of one place on another depends
on the population of both places and the distance between those places, and on
the pre-existing linguistic similarities between the places. We should probably not
place too much mathematical trust in this formula, and Chambers and Trudgill
themselves discuss some of its shortcomings. The formula does not deal well
with competing influences from different population centres and cannot account
for small villages being influenced by local towns more than metropolises such
as London that swamp them in population size. Moreover, their operationalisa-
tion of linguistic similarity was rather crude, and although there have been major
advances in quantifying linguistic distance (‘dialectometry’, see Nerbonne 2009,
for an accessible introduction) it is unclear whether the spread of language change
can really be quantified like this. The social factors that Cahmbers and Trudgill
included in their equation, however, do turn out to be relevant also in subsequent
research.
The Spread of Language Change 21
Research Highlight
NOT ALL DISTANCES ARE EQUAL
According to a pure wave model, language change would spread with an
equal speed in all directions. It follows that the linguistic distance between
two varieties should be more or less correlated with the geographical dis-
tance between these varieties. With a gravity model, the relative size of the
locations where the varieties are spoken should also play a role.
Nerbonne and Heeringa (2007) tested these hypotheses on the basis of a
dataset from over 50 locations in the north-east of the Netherlands. They
showed that there was a strong correlation between linguistic and geo-
graphical distance. Adding population size to their statistical model did not
meaningfully improve results.
But these results may be specific to the Netherlands, where the flat coun-
tryside makes travel unproblematic in all directions. In Norway, on the other
hand, there are barriers to travel in the form of mountains and fjords. There,
geographical distance correlated less well with linguistic distance, and a bet-
ter predictor was travel time—in particular, historical travel time from around
the year 1900 (Gooskens 2005). After all, more than the distance between
places it is the effort it takes to get somewhere that determines contact.
One of the latest additions to the distance measurements is cognitive dis-
tance: how far people think a place is. It turns out that, again for dialects in
the northern Netherlands where geographical distance is a very strong pre-
dictor, adding the idea that people have about distance results in a stronger
correlation with perceived linguistic distance (Sekeres 2022).
Social Networks
Research in sociolinguistics since the late 1970s has identified the role that social
networks play in the propagation of linguistic change; see, e.g., Milroy and Milroy
(1985) for an empirical account by two of the key researchers in this area. Social
networks are characterised by the interpersonal relationships we have with each
other. Network links can be weak or strong, depending on the number of different
types of social relationship we have with a person (as a family member, a neigh-
bour, a sports team mate, etc.) and the importance we place on the relationship.
Networks themselves can be dense or sparse, depending on how many people a
person has social relationships with, also have social relationships with each other.
It was found that stronger links and denser networks function as an enforcement
mechanism for (linguistic) conformity, while weaker links and sparser networks
are more open to outside (linguistic) influence.
We can link this to the wave and gravity models and to the elements in Trud-
gill’s mathematical formula. Smaller villages tend to have denser social networks
than larger cities and thus are somewhat shielded from linguistic change. Frequent
contact between weak links in different cities, on the other hand, makes it easy
for an innovation to spread from one city to the other. Once a change has been
introduced on the periphery of a network, it can make its way to the core; if core
members of a network pick up on a change, it can spread rapidly like wildfire.
Smaller towns and villages that are slower to pick up on language change simply
do not have the necessary number of contacts with the places of innovation; they
do not have enough weak links to introduce changes into the core of the network,
which itself is potentially more resistant to change in the first place.
Spread Through the Speech Community
Like the geographical spread of a change is gradual, so too is the spread of a

change within a speech community. Whenever a change is introduced in a com-
munity—either because it originated there or because it arrived there through a
weak social network link—there first follows a period of variation during which
the new (or more advanced) form co-exists with the old (or less advanced) form.
The field of variationist sociolinguistics, which started as a search for the ‘empir-
ical foundations’ of language change (Weinreich et al. 1968), has now collected
evidence on the connection between language variation and language change for
over half a century, and has uncovered a number of patterns that recur so often
that they may be seen as foundational to how a change spreads through a speech
community.
Although a change spreads through a community gradually, the pattern is not
linear. Instead, it follows what is known as an S-curve. When a change is first
introduced, it spreads slowly, and the new variant is only used by an avant-garde of
speakers and/or in very specific contexts. At some point, the change gains traction,
and once it reaches critical mass we see a rapid spread of the new variant (of course
coupled with an equally rapid demise of the old variant). Towards the end of the
process, the change slows down again, and the old variant sees some residual use
before it eventually disappears. A schematic representation of such an S-curve is
given in Fig. 2.1. During the period of variation, the new variant may be used in
certain contexts or by certain speakers more than in other contexts or by other
speakers. The variation is ‘constrained’ by various factors in what Weinreich et al.
(1968) called ‘orderly heterogeneity’.
One such factor is, almost naturally, speaker age. As most language change
happens when language is generationally transmitted (Labov 2007), we can expect
younger speakers to use relatively more of the new variant, and older speakers to
use relatively more of the old variant. Historical linguistics has found the S-curve
pattern in changes in Early Modern English (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg
2003), but such ‘real-time’ approaches to the variationist study of language change
actually came after more practical ‘apparent-time’ approaches in which speaker
age was used as a proxy for time. Taking the speech of older people as a reflection
of the speech of earlier years in fact works remarkably well, and charting language
The Beginnings of Language Change 23
Fig. 2.1 Schematic representation of the S-curve pattern of the spread of a linguistic change
through a speech community
change against speaker age instead of time gives the same S-curve pattern as his-
torical real-time studies. There are of course speakers who change their speech
significantly during their lifespan and who may therefore disrupt such an S-curve,
but they are exceptional and the influence of lifespan change can be accounted for
in an apparent-time study (Sankoff and Blondeau 2007; Sankoff 2019).
Studies have also attempted to uncover who the leaders of language change
are, and what traits they share. At the level of individual speakers, this is as yet
an unanswered question (Tamminga 2021), but when it comes to groups that lead
language change, there is a clear pattern: in the western societies in which such
research is usually done, it is typically women, rather than men, who are the inno-
vators in language change (Labov 2001, pp. 274–275). Why this should be the
case, and in particular why women should be the leaders of language change both
towards prestigious standard variants and towards low-prestige non-standard vari-
ants, is a question that has never been satisfactorily answered. Perhaps the global
overarching category of ‘women’ hides a diversity in localised feminine identities
that may draw speakers towards one or the other variant; see Meyerhoff (2019,
pp. 232–249) for a discussion.
The Beginnings of Language Change
Whereas the spread of change is an observable phenomenon, the actuation of

change is not (Yu 2023). With the possible exception of some phrases that develop
into internet memes, it is nearly always impossible to tell when, where, and by
whom an innovation was first used, let alone what caused the innovation. We have
already seen that much uncertainty remains about the transition question, so this
would suggest that we should be completely in the dark about the actuation ques-
tion. However, we have come a long way, and possible answers to the actuation
question will pop up frequently in the next chapters. The following serves as a
preview of what is to come.
Early Approaches
Like with the propagation question, scholars have been engaging with the actuation
question for a very long time. Inevitably, this means that there have now been quite
a few theories that have been proved to be wrong, or that are at least extremely
unlikely. Unfortunately, some of these persist in the wider population. We will
briefly deal with them here so that you are better equipped to do your civic duty
and can correct people when they talk nonsense about linguistics.
One set of pseudo-explanations sees climate and geography as a driving force in
language change. The cold and humid North Sea climate was blamed for a change
from /A / to /O / in Old English: it requires less opening of the mouth, so you could
▼
▲
▼
▲
avoid breathing in the chilly air (Sweet 1900, p. 32). A similar explanation is used
for Grimm’s Law, in the earliest stages of Germanic languages, when voiceless
stops changed to voiceless fricatives, thought to have occurred around the time of
a climate change towards cooler weather.1 An alternative explanation may be (or
not!) that the early Germanic peoples lived in hilly or mountainous areas and were
constantly running out of breath from walking uphill, which automatically turned
their stops into fricatives—while neighbouring Slavic peoples on the plains stuck
to stops (Meyer 1901, pp. 118–119).
Another set of explanations sees speakers’ personalities as the cause of sound
change. Sweet (1900, p. 20), who came up with the North Sea climate expla-
nation as well, notes that even children are generally able to acquire even ‘the
difficult Semitic throat-sounds’; the mispronunciations leading to language change
must be ‘the result either of carelessness or sloth’. Sometimes, these qualities are
attributed to entire groups of people. A whole range of sound changes and loss
of morphological complexity in English-based creoles and African American Ver-
nacular English has been explained with reference to personal characteristics of
the speakers, in a not even subtly racist standard language ideology that persists
to the present day (Rickford and King 2016). At the same time, the ‘courageous’
stops-to-fricatives change in Proto-Germanic was linked by the German linguist
1 There appears to have been a period of cooling around 500 BC, so that part of the theory holds
up. But fricatives actually require a more open mouth than stops, so the theory does not make a
lot of sense. Also, you would be equally likely to close your mouth for sand storms in hot desert
climates, which makes the climate approach rather vacuous (Schrodt 1974, p. 201).
and fairy-tale collector Jacob Grimm to the ‘unstoppability of [the] advance into
all parts of Europe’ of ‘the invincible German race’ (Lightfoot 2013, p. e25).2
A final theory but at the same time one of the earliest ideas about language
variation and language change is the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 5–9).
The people in the city of Babel were building a tower that reached into the heavens.
In order to restrain what people would be able to do, God made it so that they all
spoke different languages, could no longer understand each other, and moved to
different places. Many monotheistic religions, even some that did not originate in
the Middle East, have a story along similar lines. The story has mockingly been
re-named ‘wrathful dispersion theory’, in reaction to the attempted sciencification
of creationism as ‘intelligent design’. The Tower of Babel does not purport to be
an explanation for language change; it claims to explain language diversity, which
it correctly claims is related to a lack of regular communication between people.
It is simply not very precise about the direction of the link between the two.
Language Change, Language Use, and Language Users
Modern approaches to the actuation question (and in fact the transition question)
see language change as the direct result of language use, specifically language use
by human beings. This has physiological, cognitive, and social aspects. These will
be dealt with in much more detail in coming chapters, and the brief overview that
follows should serve as a preview of those discussions.
For simple physiological articulatory reasons, there is a lot of variation in
speech production. From an articulatory point of view, speech is nothing more
than a string of sounds in succession, so a string of articulatory gestures:3 raise
the tip of your tongue, round your lips, start vibrating your vocal folds, lower the
tip of your tongue again, etc. Because we are not machines, we will never be able
to produce exactly the same token of a sound twice. Try saying the sound /æ/
twenty times: while we simply hear twenty /æ/s, when you analyse them closely
you will see that they differ in precise height, frontness, pitch, and duration. As
we will see, even this mundane variation may be a trigger for sound change. Artic-
ulation becomes even less precise when you string individual sounds together and
have to deal with the transitions between sounds. Mistiming these transitions is
also a frequent cause of sound change.
2 Grimm almost seems to imply that the change was deliberate, although examples of (success-
ful) deliberate language change are exceptionally rare (cf. Thomason 2007). And where Grimm
described this change as ‘strengthening’, we shall see in later weeks that current linguistic thought
describes the same change as weakening, whatever that says about pre-historic Germanic tribes.
3 Outside articulatory phonetics, it may seem unusual to think of tongue movements as ‘gestures’,
which are more associated with signed languages. But the same argument applies to signed lan-
guages as to spoken languages: in that case, there are small variations in hand shape, position,
movement, etc., that may lead to change.
The other physiological aspect that influences language change is speech per-
ception. Our hearing is not always optimal, and there may be disturbances such as
background noise that could cause misunderstanding.4 If these misunderstandings
stick, they are another source of change. Speech perception also brings us to more
cognitive explanations of change: while at one level we can often perceive small
differences in pronunciation, at another level our perception is categorical. The
twenty [æ]s are twenty different instantiations of the same category /æ/. How we
perceive boundaries between categories, and the different factors that play a role
in this, can also bring about sound change.
The main cognitive factor that we deal with in language is that humans tend
to categorise events and try to spot patterns. These become shortcuts in our brains
that make it easier and quicker to deal with the world. But sometimes we spot
patterns or make categories that do not exist for other language users, or even
force some structure onto language that was not previously there. We may do this
on an individual basis, but when we then produce new utterances based on that
conceptualisation of how language works, we add to the evidence that our patterns
and categories are the correct ones, and more people may adopt them.
Language learning, then, is also a cognitive activity. It is predominantly chil-
dren who learn language who are engaged in the conceptualisation of patterns and
categories, which is why we often think of language change as generational. But
we can also add or change patterns and categories in adulthood. This happens
sometimes in our first language (‘lifespan change’) but perhaps more frequently
also in our second language. When patterns and categories from different language
are active in our brains, this may lead to contact-induced language change.
A final cognitive factor in language change is that humans are inherently cre-
ative. Not only do we use the building blocks at our disposal to create new
utterances on a daily basis that have never been used in the history of humankind,
we also sometimes creatively change the building blocks themselves, or the rules
for putting these blocks together.
Language Change as Evolution
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, historical linguists have increasingly also
made use of theories from biological and cultural evolution. Although Charles Dar-
win already noted that his theory of evolution could apply to languages as well, the
historical linguistic theories in this framework are more properly seen in the light
of the work in cultural evolution, most notably Richard Dawkins’s The selfish gene
(Dawkins 1976). Evolutionary approaches to language change have been proposed
by Croft (2000, 2008), Ritt (2004), and Mufwene (2008); Kretzschmar’s (2015)
work on language as a complex system takes a related approach. While they differ
in details, the underlying principles are the same. The presentation here is based
4 For signed languages, the same applies to sight.

on Ritt (2004), who uses examples from the history of English to illustrate the
theory.
Darwinian evolution is based on variation in genetic structures, originating, for
example, from copying errors in replication. Certain structures from a varied pool
replicate better than others because they are ultimately more suited to their envi-
ronment. Linguistic evolution should be seen in the same way: certain variants
replicate better than others, which is how variation in language leads to change.
Ritt (2004, p. 89) stresses that he does not propose this as a metaphor for lan-
guage change (as, e.g., in Blevins 2004) but that he really sees evolution as the
mechanism through which language changes: languages exist in humans as ‘hosts’
and develop on their own. The question for linguistics, then, is what the unit of
replication is, and what pressures there are on the selection of one variant over
another.
In Dawkins’s view of evolution, the unit of replication is a meme. These are
networks of associations (with a neural basis in the brain) that we may think
of linguistically as existing of different components. What Ritt calls a ‘phone-
meme’ is linked in our minds to articulatory gestures, an auditory impression, and
the various lexical or morphological items in which it occurs. A ‘morph-meme’
contains phonological, syntactic, semantic, and suprasegmental information (Ritt
2004, pp. 171, 173). So a linguistic meme, in this sense, is not a picture of a cat
on the internet, but can be, for example, the phoneme /i /, the concept of a long
▼
▲
vowel, consonant-vowel syllable structure, or a strong-weak rhythmic structure.

Such linguistic memes replicate and evolve, not in language acquisition as some
earlier accounts of language change would have, but in language use (Croft 2008,
p. 222). Not all memes have the same changes of replication, and this ‘survival of
the fittest’ depends on a number of selective pressures. We have seen a number of
these pressures already: they can be, for example, the human articulatory system
and human auditory perception, or the frequency and social meaning of variants.
Memes are also influenced by surrounding memes (Ritt 2004, pp. 221–227). They
can even evolve together with other memes in order to increase their chances of
replication, in a process of meme co-adaptation (Ritt 2004, p. 237). This, just like
errors in replication, can be an evolutionary answer to the actuation question.
As an illustration of his evolutionary theory of language change, Ritt (2004,
pp. 240–288) discusses a set of changes to vowel length in Late Old and Early
Middle English. These are discussed in this book in Chapter 5 following a tra-
ditional rule-based account as four separate changes—homorganic lengthening,
pre-cluster shortening, open syllable lengthening, and trisyllabic shortening—each
with a fair number of exceptions. In Ritt’s account, these four changes are ulti-
mately one and the same process: ‘two memes [the long and short versions of the
same vowel] competing for membership in higher-level mimetic configurations’
(p. 241). The rhythmic structure of English in this period was strongly trochaic,
a strong syllable followed by a weak one. In order to best fit this structure, and
to increase their chances of replication in the syntactic and rhythmic contexts in
which they occurred most frequently, some words (morph-memes) teamed up with
a phone-meme of a different length. This also explains the many exceptions to the
rule-based account: different combinations of pressures led to different statistical

likelihoods of outcomes (Ritt 2004, p. 274).
As this evolutionary account of language change shows, there are many possible
reasons why language may change, and at any given time a variety of them might
be at play simultaneously. We will return to these reasons both explicitly and
implicitly throughout this book as we look at concrete changes in the history of
English. At times the actuation and transition questions may take centre stage,
but we may also sometimes discuss the smaller details of a change and then it is
up to the reader to think about where the changes fit into the larger questions of
historical linguistics.
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Part II
Sound change
Phonetic Change
Why Sound Change Is Both Regular and Random
3
Introduction
∫traight to the Point
Consider the words state and straight. At first glance, the only difference between
the two is that straight has an /r/ sound while state does not. But if you listen
closely, you will find that for many speakers of English there is an additional dif-
ference: whereas state is just [steIt], straight sounds more like [∫tôeIt]. In other
words, it sounds like the /s/ in straight is pronounced as [∫]. Perception exper-
iments and acoustic measurements (Rutter 2011; Stevens and Harrington 2016)
show that the [∫] in straight is very similar to or even indistinguishable from the
[∫] in shake /∫eIk/, where you would expect it in the first place.
If we want to understand why the /s/ in straight is often pronounced as [∫],
we need to take a much closer look at what happens in our mouth when we
articulate this word. Let us first look at the articulation of the sequence /tr/, as
in tray. To articulate [t], you raise the tip of your tongue towards your alveolar
ridge. To articulate the next sound [ô], which is the most common realisation of
/r/ in English, the tip of your tongue is retracted and perhaps curled back but still
roughly at the same height as your alveolar ridge. As your tongue transitions from
the [t] to the [ô], it briefly passes a position just behind your alveolar ridge: the
exact place of articulation of the post-alveolar fricative [∫]. This means that for
many speakers of English, the word tray begins with the sequence [t∫ô]. Now add
an /s/ to the beginning of that sequence, as you would do in straight. It is very
likely that your brain is already preparing your tongue for that [t∫ô] that follows,
and you do not quite hit the exact position just below your alveolar ridge that is
necessary to articulate an [s]. Instead, you end up slightly short of that position,
again in the place of articulation of [∫]. Rather than [stô], the word straight actually
begins with [∫t∫ô] for many speakers.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41692-7_3
34 3 Phonetic Change
This so-called s-retraction is a feature found in many speakers of English around

the world. It has been reported for the United States (Lawrence 2000; Baker et al.
2011; Rutter 2011), the United Kingdom (Lindsey 2019), Australia (Stevens and
Harrington 2016), and Trinidad and Tobago (Ahlers and Meer 2019) and likely
occurs in other varieties as well. Because we can pinpoint the exact articulatory
processes that give rise to s-retraction, it serves as a prototypical example of sound
change that we will return to at several places in this chapter.
Chapter Overview
There are several reasons why we begin our search for an answer to the actuation
question by looking at sound change. The first is that sounds are the most elemen-
tary building blocks of language, and sound change has historically been seen as
the purest form of language change. By starting here, we simply follow tradition.
A more important reason is that, as we have seen for s-retraction, sound change
can often be quite transparently linked to physiological factors, giving us clear and
tangible explanations that may not be available for lexical and syntactic change.
As we will see in this chapter and the next, however, physiological factors play a
role in phonetic change, i.e., the type of sound change where it is mostly irrele-
vant that sounds together form a linguistic system of phonemic contrasts. When
we look at phonological change, the other type of sound change, physiological
factors will take a back seat to cognitive factors.
The main thought that will be presented in this chapter is that sound change
is regular. We will continuously be chipping away at this notion, but with a few
important caveats, regularity is still a cornerstone of the study of sound change.
Once it happens, that is, because the one thing that is unpredictable about sound
change is when it occurs.
Sound Change Is Regular
Historical Linguistics as a Science
The long nineteenth century was a period of great progress in our understanding of
language change. A lot of this was due to our improving understanding of science
in general and the application of the scientific method to linguistic research. In
their search for the oldest, most original form of their language—a quest jointly
inspired by the nineteenth-century ideologies of national-romanticism and colo-
nialism—linguists used the comparative method. By systematically comparing
languages, they aimed to, firstly, establish whether similarities between languages
pointed to a ‘genetic’ relationship between them, and secondly, try to reconstruct
what a proto-version of the language(s) would have been like.
Sound Change Is Regular 35
Table 3.1 Regular correspondences in five Germanic languages

English German Dutch Norwegian Icelandic
fish Fisch vis fisk fiskur
find finden vinden finne finna
foot Fuß voet fot fótur
freeze frieren vriezen fryse frjósa
thin dünn dun tynn þunnur
thorn Dorn doorn torn þorn
three drei drie tre þrír
thief Dieb dief tyv þjúfur
hound Hund hond hund hundur
house Haus huis hus hús
high hoch hoog høy hár
hand Hand hand hånd hönd
The evidence we need for this comes from regular correspondences: a sound in
language must generally and systematically correspond to a sound in another lan-
guage, whatever word you are looking at. Take, for example, the words in Table 3.1
from five languages in North-West Europe. If you look at the initial consonants in
these words, the similarities are striking and the patterns are almost immediately
clear. English f - corresponds to f - in German, Norwegian, and Icelandic, and to
v- in Dutch; English th- [θ] corresponds to d- in German and Dutch, to t- in Nor-
wegian, and to þ- [θ] in Icelandic; and English h- corresponds to h- in all four
other languages. There are many more words that can be added to this table, and
many more sets of consonants for which such a table can be set up.
The systematicity in these correspondences suggests that these five languages
share a common ancestor. Wherever there was a sound change, such as the change
[θ] > [d] in Dutch, it applied regularly. In the relatively infrequent cases where the
correspondence does not work, this is very often because we are talking about a
loan word. For example, the German and Dutch equivalents for throne and theatre
do not begin with /d/ but with /t/ because these are both loans from late medieval
French where the word was pronounced with initial /t/. (The /θ/ in English appears
to be a learned over-etymologising spelling pronunciation based on the Greek
origin of these words; when English borrowed this word from French, it was orig-
inally also with /t/.) An alternative reason for a lack of correspondence, especially
if the exceptions themselves also seem to be regular and systematic, can be that
subsequent sound changes have obscured the regularity (more on this below). It
is also important to note that in order to find such regular correspondences, you
cannot always use direct translations of the words. The best English translation of
German Hund would be ‘dog’, but it is clear that ‘hound’ is the word that is the
‘cognate’, the word that is genetically related. The semantic shifts that we find in
cognates can sometimes be greater than in ‘dog’ ~ ‘hound’, but they are always in
some way transparently related.
The similarities between closely related languages (such as the Germanic lan-
guages in Table 3.1, but also Romance and Slavic languages, for example) are
obvious and were of course well known already before the nineteenth century.
The broader, more distant relationships were not, however. The study of Sanskrit,
in comparison with Latin and Ancient Greek, was one of the factors that helped
bring to light these distant relationships. Bengal-based British judge Sir William
Jones suggested in a 1786 lecture that the similarities were so striking that this
could not be a coincidence. Just like Romance languages have a common ancestor
in (Vulgar) Latin, Sanskrit, Latin, and Ancient Greek must have had a common
ancestor too. This ancestor language is now known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE).
One of the goals of historical linguistics, or ‘philology’ as it was often called at
the time, became to reconstruct the lexicon, phonology and grammar of PIE, and
chart the language changes that led to the split into the Indo-European language
sub-families. The overviews of regular correspondences in related languages form
a synchronic record of the diachronic changes that have taken place in these lan-
guages. With some logical thinking, we can then hypothesise in what order these
changes must have taken place and follow the path back to an earlier version of
the language.
Problems for the Regularity Hypothesis
Neogrammarian Change
A group of linguists, predominantly writing in German, went to work try-

ing to reconstruct these different earlier stages of the languages of Europe:
Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Celtic, etc. They are known as the
Neogrammarians or Junggrammatiker, which roughly translates as ‘new-style lin-
guists’. They used the idea of completely regular sound changes as a guiding
principle and were able to capture the major divergences that occurred between
language sub-families in a series of ‘sound laws’; there is a wide variety of regu-
lar historical sound changes that are now known as Someone’s Law. The influence
of the neogrammarians on the study of sound change was so large that you often
see the term ‘neogrammarian change’ for any regular, exceptionless sound change.
The most important sound change that sets Germanic languages apart from
other Indo-European languages is the change known as Grimm’s Law, named after
Jacob Grimm, who is otherwise known as a fairy-tale collector. (It was actually
Friedrich von Schlegel and Rasmus Rask who described the sound change first,
but Grimm today gets the credit for it, in part because Rask wrote in Danish and
his publications were not as widely known. In Denmark, the change is typically
known as Rask-Grimm’s Law.) Grimm’s Law consists of three sets of changes:
Problems for the Regularity Hypothesis 37
1. The PIE voiceless stops /p t k/ become voiceless fricatives /f θ h/ in Proto-

Germanic, and this change does not happen in other Indo-European languages.
Compare Latin piscis ‘fish’, trēs ‘three’ and canis ‘hound’ with their English
translations as examples.
2. The PIE voiced stops /b d l/ become voiceless stops /p t k/ in Proto-Germanic,
and do not undergo this change in other Indo-European languages. Examples
here are Latin duo ‘two’ and genū ‘knee’. (There is no evidence of word-initial
/b/ in PIE, but that change has been attested in different positions in a small
number of words.)
3. The PIE voiced aspirated stops /bh dh lh / become voiced stops /b d l/ in Proto-
Germanic. Here we have to compare Sanskrit bhrātar ‘brother’ and dhā- ‘put’,
cognate with English ‘do’, as examples. Comparisons with Latin are less obvi-
ous, because these voiced aspirated stops also did not make it into Latin: the
equivalents are frāter and fēci ‘I made’, both with /f/.
Germanic languages all show Grimm’s Law, while non-Germanic Indo-European

languages do not. The regularity of the pattern is sometimes hidden by subsequent
sound changes. For example, the English cognate (and translation) of Latin crūdus
is ‘raw’, which does not start with /h/ as we would expect based on Grimm’s Law.
The Old English form, however, was hrēaw, with an /h/ that was lost from such
initial consonant clusters in the twelfth century.
In other languages
GRIMM’S LAW: THE SEQUEL AND THE REMAKE
The outcomes of Grimm’s Law are also obscured in German, remarkably by
a repeat of Grimm’s Law. This is known as the Second Germanic consonant
shift (Grimm’s Law being the first) or the High German consonant shift. The
changes that constituted it took place in Old High German between the 4th
and 10th centuries, in some cases not long after Grimm’s Law itself. The
voiceless stops that resulted from Grimm’s Law again change to voiceless
fricatives, so we have modern German hoffen ‘hope’, Wasser ‘water’, and
machen ‘make’. In some positions, they remain at an intermediate stage as
affricates: Apfel ‘apple’, Zaun [tsa*n] ‘fence’ (cognate with town). Voiced
stops change to voiceless stops, as in Tier ‘animal’ (cognate with deer).
These changes happened most consistently in southern German varieties,
such as Bavarian and Swiss German. If we go further north, more and more
parts of the Second Germanic consonant shift do not apply. The different
isoglosses for these changes run close together in the eastern part of the
German language area, but in the west, they fan out and spread a much
larger area along the river Rhine. This ‘Rhenish fan’ is probably the most
famous isogloss bundle outside the English-speaking world.
We also find Grimm’s Law-type changes in non-Germanic languages. The

variety of Italian spoken in Tuscany, for example, is famous for the ‘Tuscan
gorgia’, where stops (in standard Italian) are pronounced as fricatives: i piedi
[i FjEdi] ‘the feet’, la torta [la θorta] ‘the cake’, and la casa [la xaza] ‘the
house’. This change also applies to voiced stops, e.g., e beve [e βeve] ‘(s)he
drinks’ (examples from Montemagni et al. 2013). This suggests that a change
from a stop to a fricative is fairly common cross-linguistically.
Seemingly Irregular Change
Grimm’s Law is the most famous example of a neogrammarian sound change.

However, there also appeared to be many examples where the law did not apply.
In some of these examples, a voiceless stop changed to a voiced stop instead of
the voiceless fricative that we expected: Latin patēr corresponds to Old English
fæder, not *fæþer.1 In other examples, the voiceless stop does not change at all:
Latin spūo is English ‘spew’, not *sfew; and octō corresponds to ‘eight’ (Old
English ahta, not *ahþa). So does this mean that the ultimate neogrammarian
change is not in fact regular and exceptionless, and that it, therefore, maybe is not
a neogrammarian change? Does the neogrammarian hypothesis even hold at all?
It appears that Grimm’s Law does not apply if the stop is the second element in
a consonant cluster: stops do not become fricatives after /s/, and if there are two
stops in a row, only the first becomes a fricative. This looks like a problem for
the neogrammarian hypothesis, but this exception itself also constitutes a regular
pattern. Sound changes do not have to apply across the board, but they can be
conditioned: as long as the change applies in every instance where the conditions
are met, we still have regular and exceptionless change. The s-retraction from the
beginning of this chapter is an example of such a conditioned sound change: /s/
changes to /∫/ only when it is in a consonant cluster that also contains /r/. We often
write these conditioned sound changes in the form of a phonological rule:
/s/ → /∫/ / __Cr
Unfortunately for Grimm’s Law, not all exceptions were covered by the condi-
tion about consonant clusters: we still have words like Old English fæder where
Grimm’s Law should have applied, but did not. Once again this endangered the
1 Later change in English caused father to be pronounced with /ð/ in present-day English. Regular
sound change should have given /fæd∂/ for father. The /d/ changed to a fricative because that fit
the pattern found in other kinship terms such as brother. This is called analogy; see Chapter 8.
Brother had /θ/ in early Old English, in accordance with Grimm’s Law, which later changed to /ð/
in regular sound change.
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The Linguistics of The History of English Remco Knooihuizen Full Chapter

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The Linguistics of the History of

English Remco Knooihuizen

ISBN 978-3-031-41691-0 ISBN 978-3-031-41692-7 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Contributor: tbkmedia.de/Alamy Stock Photo

This is an introductory textbook on the history of the English language. At the

Groningen, The Netherlands Remco Knooihuizen

Part II Sound change

Part III Contact-Induced Change

Part IV Structural Change

Fig. 2.1 Schematic representation of the S-curve pattern

Table 3.1 Regular correspondences in five Germanic languages . . . . . . . . 35

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 3

Old English (500–1150)

The Romans were gone, to begin with.

Old English was characterised by an almost exclusively Germanic lexicon, which

Middle English (1150–1500)

Early Modern English (1500–1700)

twelue baskets full of broken meate.

Late Modern English (1700–Now)

of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and, at least as

Sources for English Historical Linguistics

If we want to study language change in the history of English, we have to start

All in all, English is an extremely high-resource language, with many corpora

From Sources to Explanations

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 17

The Spread of Language Change

The question of how language change spreads is comparatively easy, because we

One of the better-known visualisations in historical linguistics is that of language

way, such as bodies of water, mountain ridges, marshland, or social barriers to

Spread Through the Speech Community

Like the geographical spread of a change is gradual, so too is the spread of a

The Beginnings of Language Change

Whereas the spread of change is an observable phenomenon, the actuation of

Language Change, Language Use, and Language Users

Language Change as Evolution

4 For signed languages, the same applies to sight.

vowel, consonant-vowel syllable structure, or a strong-weak rhythmic structure.

rule-based account: different combinations of pressures led to different statistical

∫traight to the Point

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 33

This so-called s-retraction is a feature found in many speakers of English around

Sound Change Is Regular

Historical Linguistics as a Science

Table 3.1 Regular correspondences in five Germanic languages

Problems for the Regularity Hypothesis

A group of linguists, predominantly writing in German, went to work try-

1. The PIE voiceless stops /p t k/ become voiceless fricatives /f θ h/ in Proto-

Germanic languages all show Grimm’s Law, while non-Germanic Indo-European

We also find Grimm’s Law-type changes in non-Germanic languages. The

Seemingly Irregular Change

Grimm’s Law is the most famous example of a neogrammarian sound change.

/s/ → /∫/ / __Cr

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