Language change

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Not to be confused with language shift.
"Linguistic corruption" redirects here. For errors in grammar, see Solecism. For non-standard words
or pronunciation, see Barbarism (linguistics).
Language change is variation over time in
a language's phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features. It is studied
by historical linguistics and evolutionary linguistics. Some commentators use the label corruption to
suggest that language change constitutes a degradation in the quality of a language, especially when
the change originates from human error or prescriptively discouraged usage.[1] Descriptive
linguistics typically does not support this concept, since from a scientific point of view such changes
are neither good nor bad.

Contents
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 1Causes
 2Types
o 2.1Lexical changes
o 2.2Phonetic and phonological changes
o 2.3Spelling changes
o 2.4Semantic changes
o 2.5Syntactic change
 3Sociolinguistics
 4Quantification
 5Language shift and social status
 6See also
 7Notes
 8References
 9External links
 10Further reading

Causes[edit]
 Economy: Speakers tend to make their utterances as efficient and effective as possible to reach
communicative goals. Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs and benefits.
 The principle of least effort tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms. See vowel
reduction, cluster reduction, lenition, and elision. After some time a change may become
widely accepted (it becomes a regular sound change) and may end up treated as a
standard. For instance: going to [ˈɡoʊ.ɪŋ.tʊ] → gonna [ˈɡɔnə] or [ˈɡʌnə], with examples of
both vowel reduction [ʊ] → [ə] and elision [nt] → [n], [oʊ.ɪ] → [ʌ].
 Analogy: reducing word forms by likening different forms of the word to the root.
 Language contact: borrowing of words and constructions from other languages.[2]
 Geographic separation: when people move away from each other, their language will diverge, at
least for the vocabulary, due to different experiences.[3]
 Cultural environment: Groups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and objects in their
language, whether they encounter different people there or not.
 Migration/Movement: Speakers will change and create languages, such as pidgins and creoles.[2]
 Imperfect learning: According to one view, children regularly learn the adult forms imperfectly,
and the changed forms then turn into a new standard. Alternatively, imperfect learning occurs
regularly in one part of society, such as an immigrant group, where the minority language forms
a substratum, and the changed forms can ultimately influence majority usage.[3]
 Social prestige: Language may not only change towards a prestigious accent, but also away
from one with negative prestige,[3] as in the case of rhoticity of Received Pronunciation.[4] Such
movements can go back and forward.[5]
According to Guy Deutscher, the tricky question is "Why are changes not brought up short and
stopped in their tracks? At first sight, there seem to be all the reasons in the world why society should
never let the changes through." He sees the reason for tolerating change in the fact that we already
are used to "synchronic variation", to the extent that we are hardly aware of it. For example, when we
hear the word "wicked", we automatically interpret it as either "evil" or "wonderful", depending on
whether it is uttered by an elderly lady or a teenager. Deutscher speculates that "[i]n a hundred
years' time, when the original meaning of 'wicked' has all but been forgotten, people may wonder
how it was ever possible for a word meaning 'evil' to change its sense to 'wonderful' so quickly."[6]

Types[edit]
All languages change continually,[7] and do so in many and varied ways.
Marcel Cohen details various types of language change under the overall headings of the external
evolution[8] and internal evolution of languages.[9]
Lexical changes[edit]
The study of lexical changes forms the diachronic portion of the science of onomasiology.
The ongoing influx of new words into the English language (for example) helps make it a rich field for
investigation into language change, despite the difficulty of defining precisely and accurately the
vocabulary available to speakers of English. Throughout its history English has not only borrowed
words from other languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings,
whilst losing some old words.
Dictionary-writers try to keep track of the changes in languages by recording (and, ideally, dating) the
appearance in a language of new words, or of new usages for existing words. By the same token,
they may tag some words eventually as "archaic" or "obsolete".
Phonetic and phonological changes[edit]
Main articles: Sound change and Phonological change
The concept of sound change covers both phonetic and phonological developments.
The sociolinguist William Labov recorded the change in pronunciation in a relatively short period in
the American resort of Martha's Vineyard and showed how this resulted from social tensions and
processes.[10] Even in the relatively short time that broadcast media have recorded their work, one
can observe the difference between the pronunciation of the newsreaders of the 1940s and the
1950s and the pronunciation of today. The greater acceptance and fashionability of regional
accents in media may[original research?] also reflect a more democratic, less formal society — compare the
widespread adoption of language policies.
The mapping and recording of small-scale phonological changes poses difficulties, especially as the
practical technology of sound recording dates only from the 19th century. Written texts provide the
main (indirect) evidence of how language sounds have changed over the centuries. But
note Ferdinand de Saussure's work on postulating the existence and disappearance
of laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European as an example of other methods of detecting/reconstructing
sound-changes within historical linguistics. Poetic devices such as rhyme and rhythm may provide
clues to previous phonological habits.
Spelling changes[edit]
Standardisation of spelling originated relatively recently.[vague][citation needed] Differences in spelling often
catch the eye of a reader of a text from a previous century. The pre-print era had
fewer literate people: languages lacked fixed systems of orthography, and the handwritten
manuscripts that survive often show words spelled according to regional pronunciation and to
personal preference.
Semantic changes[edit]
Main article: Semantic change
Semantic changes are shifts in the meanings of existing words. Basic types of semantic change
include:

 pejoration, in which a term's connotations become more negative

 amelioration, in which a term's connotations become more positive
 broadening, in which a term acquires additional potential uses
 narrowing, in which a term's potential uses are restricted
After a word enters a language, its meaning can change as through a shift in the valence of its
connotations. As an example, when "villain" entered English it meant 'peasant' or 'farmhand', but
acquired the connotation 'low-born' or 'scoundrel', and today only the negative use survives. Thus
'villain' has undergone pejoration. Conversely, the word "wicked" is undergoing amelioration in
colloquial contexts, shifting from its original sense of 'evil', to the much more positive one as of
2009 of 'brilliant'.
Words' meanings may also change in terms of the breadth of their semantic domain. Narrowing a
word limits its alternative meanings, whereas broadening associates new meanings with it. For
example, "hound" (Old English hund) once referred to any dog, whereas in modern English it
denotes only a particular type of canid. On the other hand, the word "dog" has been broadened from
its Old English root 'dogge', the name of a particular breed, to become the general term for all
canines.[11]
Syntactic change[edit]
Main article: Syntactic change
Syntactic change is the evolution of the syntactic structure of a natural language.
Over time, syntactic change is the greatest modifier of a particular language. Massive changes –
attributable either to creolization or to relexification – may occur both in syntax and in vocabulary.

Sociolinguistics[edit]
The sociolinguist Jennifer Coates, following William Labov, describes linguistic change as occurring
in the context of linguistic heterogeneity. She explains that "[l]inguistic change can be said to have
taken place when a new linguistic form, used by some sub-group within a speech community, is
adopted by other members of that community and accepted as the norm."[12]
Can and Patton (2010) provide a quantitative analysis of twentieth century Turkish literature using
forty novels of forty authors. Using weighted least squares regression and a sliding window
approach, they show that, as time passes, words, in terms of both tokens (in text) and types (in
vocabulary), have become longer. They indicate that the increase in word lengths with time can be
attributed to the government-initiated language "reform" of the 20th century. This reform aimed at
replacing foreign words used in Turkish, especially Arabic- and Persian-based words (since they
were in majority when the reform was initiated in early 1930s), with newly coined pure Turkish
neologisms created by adding suffixes to Turkish word stems (Lewis, 1999).
Can and Patton (2010), based on their observations of the change of a specific word use (more
specifically in newer works the preference of ama over fakat, both borrowed from Arabic and
meaning 'but', and their inverse usage correlation is statistically significant), also speculate that the
word length increase can influence the common word choice preferences of authors.

Quantification[edit]
Altintas, Can, and Patton (2007) introduce a systematic approach to language change quantification
by studying unconsciously-used language features in time-separated parallel translations. For this
purpose, they use objective style markers such as vocabulary richness and lengths of words, word
stems and suffixes, and employ statistical methods to measure their changes over time.

Language shift and social status[edit]

Main article: Language shift
Languages perceived to be "higher status" stabilise or spread at the expense of other languages
perceived by their own speakers to be "lower-status".
Historical examples are the early Welsh and Lutheran bible translations, leading to the liturgical
languages Welsh and High German thriving today, unlike other Celtic or German variants.[13]
For prehistory, Forster and Renfrew (2011)[14] argue that in some cases there is a correlation of
language change with intrusive male Y chromosomes but not with female mtDNA. They then
speculate that technological innovation (transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, or from stone
to metal tools) or military prowess (as in the abduction of British women by Vikings to Iceland)
causes immigration of at least some males, and perceived status change. Then, in mixed-language
marriages with these males, prehistoric women would often have chosen to transmit the "higher-
status" spouse's language to their children, yielding the language/Y-chromosome correlation seen
today.

See also[edit]
 Calque
 Grammaticalization
 Koiné language
 Morphemization
 Neologism
 Origin of language
 Phono-semantic matching
 Wave model (lingui