LANGUAGE, HISTORY and

CHANGE
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Family tree
✘ Investigating the features of older languages, and the ways in which they
developed into modern languages is called philology.
✘ a variety of languages spoken in different parts of the world were
actually members of the same family.
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Indo-European
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Family connections

Sanskrit Latin Ancient Greek

pitar pater pate¯r (“father”)
bhra¯tar fra¯ter phra¯ter (“brother”)
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Cognates
✘ establish a possible family connection between different languages involved
looking at what are called “cognates.”
✘ A cognate of a word in one language is a word in another language that has a
similar form and is or was used with a similar meaning.
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Comparative reconstruction

✘ The aim of this procedure is to reconstruct what must have been the original
or “proto” form in the common ancestral language.
✘ the history of languages operate on the basis of some general principles, two
of which are presented here.
✘ The majority principle:
✘ If, in a cognate set, three words begin with a [p] sound and one word begins
with a [b] sound
✘ then our best guess is that the majority have retained the original sound (i.e.
[p]).
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The most natural development principle

✘ certain types of sound change are very common whereas others are
extremely unlikely.

(1) Final vowels often disappear (vino → vin)

(2) Voiceless sounds become voiced, typically between vowels (muta → muda)
(3) Stops become fricatives (ripa → riva)
(4) Consonants become voiceless at the end of words (rizu → ris)
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Sound reconstruction

Languages
A B C
Cantare cantar chanter (“sing”)
catena cadena chaîne (“chain”)
caro caro cher (“dear”)
cavallo caballo cheval (“horse”)
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Word reconstruction

mube mupe mup (“stream”)

abadi apati apat (“rock”)

agana akana akan (“knife”)

enugu enuku enuk (“diamond”)

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The history of English

✘ Old English: before 1100
Middle English: 1100 to 1500
Early Modern English: 1500 to 1700
Modern English: after 1700
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The history of English

✘ Old English: before 1100
✘ Germanic languages spoken by tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes.
✘ Middle English: 1100 to 1500
✘ The beginning of the Middle English period, is the arrival of the Norman French
in England
✘ the sounds of English underwent a substantial change known as the “Great
Vowel Shift.
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Sound Changes
✘ number of changes from Middle to Modern English, some sounds
disappeared from the pronunciation of certain words.
✘ The initial [h] of many Old English words was lost, as in hlud → loud
and hlaford → lord.
✘ Some words lost sounds, but kept the spelling, resulting in the “silent
letters” of contemporary written English.
✘ Word-initial velar stops [k] and [ɡ] are no longer pronounced before
nasals [n],
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Metathesis , Epenthesis and Prothesis

✘ The sound change known as metathesis involves a reversal in position of two
sounds in a word.
✘ acsian → ask frist → first

✘ epenthesis, involves the addition of a sound to the middle of a word.

✘ æmtig → empty spinel → spindle timr → timber
✘ prothesis involves the addition of a sound to the beginning of a word.
✘ schola → escuela (“school”) scribere → escribir (“to write”)
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Syntactic Changes and Loss of Inflections

✘ In Old English texts, we find the Subject–Verb–Object (or SVO) order
most common in Modern English,
✘ but we can also find a number of different orders that are no longer used.
✘ For example,
✘ the subject could follow the verb, as in ferde he (“traveled
he”),
✘ and the object could be placed before the verb, as in he hine geseah (“he him
saw”),
✘ Nouns, adjectives, articles and pronouns all had different inflectional forms
according to their grammatical function in the sentence.
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Semantic Changes
✘ Enormous words were borrowed from different languages.
✘ The meaning of the words have broadened.
✘ Example : the use of foda
(fodder for animals) to all kinds of food.

✘ The meaning of some words have narrowed.

✘ hund, once used for any kind of dog, but now, as hound, used only for some
specific breeds.
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Diachronic and Synchronic Variation

✘ changes can be linked to major social changes caused by wars, invasions and
other upheavals,
✘ the most pervasive source of change in language seems to be in the continual
process of cultural transmission .
✘ Diachronically: study the language from the historical perspective of change
through time.
✘ Synchronically: study the differences within one language in
different places and among different groups at the same time
Regional Variation in
Language
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The Standard Language

✘ idealized variety, with no specific region associated with administrative,
commercial and educational centers, regardless of region.
✘ the version we believe is found in printed English in newspapers, books
and the mass media in general .
✘ associated with the written language (i.e. vocabulary, spelling, grammar)
than the spoken language.
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Accent and Dialect

✘ accent” is the description of aspects of pronunciation that identify where
an individual speaker is from, regionally or socially.
✘ dialect, describes features of grammar and vocabulary as well as
aspects of pronunciation.
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Variation in Grammar

✘ How long are youse here?

B : Till after Easter.
(Speaker A looks puzzled.)
C : We came on Sunday.
A : Ah. Youse’re here a while then
✘ How long are youse here?, =“How long have you been here?”
✘ youse (= “you” plural)
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Dialectology
✘ dialectology, to distinguish between two different dialects of the same
language (whose speakers can usually understand each other) and two
different languages (whose speakers can’t usually understand each other).
✘ Regional Dialects
✘ to the identification of consistent features of speech found in one
geographical area compared to another.
✘ Isoglosses
✘ The line is called an isogloss and represents a boundary
between the areas with regard to that one particular linguistic item.
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Dialectology
✘ Dialect boundary
✘ When a number of isoglosses come together in this way, a more solid line,
indicating a dialect boundary, can be drawn.
✘ The Dialect Continuum
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Social Variation in Language

✘ The term sociolinguistics is used generally for the study of the
relationship between language and society.
✘ A speech community is a group of people who share a set of norms
and expectations regarding the use of language.
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Social Dialects
✘ regional dialects tended to concentrate on the speech of people in rural
areas.
✘ social dialects concerns with speakers in towns and cities.
✘ it is social class that is mainly used to define groups of speakers as
having something in common.
✘ There are two main groups :
✘ “middle class,” those who have more years of education
✘ “working class,” those who have fewer years of education and perform
manual work of some kind.

pronunciations, words and structures

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Education and Occupation

✘ idiolect: the personal dialect of an individual speaker.
✘ there is a general pattern of using certain forms that are relatively
infrequent in the speech of those who go on to complete college.
✘ Ex: Them boys throwed somethin’ or It wasn’t us what done it .
✘ Social class New York City Reading
✘ upper middle class 32 0
✘ lower middle class 20 28
✘ upper working class 12 44
✘ lower working class 0 49
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Social Markers
✘ having this feature occur frequently in your speech (or not) marks you
as a member of a particular social group, whether you realize it or not.
✘ throughout the English-speaking world, is the final pronunciation of -
ing with [n] rather than [ŋ] at the end of words such as sitting and
thinking.
✘ Another social marker is called “[h]-dropping,” which makes the words
at and hat sound the same.
✘ several grammatical features that have been identified as more typically
working class than middle class in studies of British English
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Speech Style and Style-Shifting

✘ a way of speaking that is either formal/careful or informal/casual

✘ Formal style is when we pay more careful attention
✘ informal style is when we pay less attention.
✘ A change from one to the other by an individual is called style-shifting.
✘ speakers produce different forms or odd pronunciations as they shift their
speech style to try to “speak better is called hypercorrection .
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Prestige
✘ status that is generally recognized as “better” or more positively valued in the
larger community, in contrast to covert prestige
✘ covert prestige having positive value may explain why certain groups do not
exhibit style-shifting to the same extent as other groups.
✘
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Speech Accommodation
✘ our ability to modify our speech style toward or away from the perceived
style of the person(s) we are talking to.
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Convergence and Divergence

✘ a speech style that attempts to reduce social distance, described as
convergence,
✘ a speech style is used to emphasize social distance between speakers,
the process is called divergence.
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Register
✘ a conventional way of using language that is appropriate in a specific
context,
✘ may be identified
1. situational (e.g. in church),
2. occupational (e.g. among lawyers)
3. or topical (e.g. talking about language).
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Jargon
✘ special technical vocabulary associated with a specific activity or
topic as part of a register .
✘ helps to create and maintain connections among those who
see themselves as “insiders” in some way and to exclude “outsiders.”
✘ learning of the appropriate jargon of a profession that qualifies an
individual as a valid professional within that area of expertise.
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Slang
✘ describes words or phrases that are used instead of more everyday terms
among younger speakers and other groups with special interests.
✘ It can be used by those inside a group who share ideas and
attitudes as a way of distinguishing themselves from others.
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Taboo Terms
✘ words or phrases that are avoided in formal speech.
✘ Taboo terms are words and phrases, that people avoid for reasons related
to religion, politeness and prohibited behavior.
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African American English

✘ AAE is a variety used by many (not all) African Americans in many
different regions of the USA.
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Vernacular Language
✘ expression for a kind of social dialect,
✘ typically spoken by a lower-status group, which is treated as “non-
standard” because of marked differences from the “standard”
language.
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The Sounds of a Vernacular

✘ the tendency to reduce final consonant clusters,
✘ so that words ending in two consonants (left hand) are
often pronounced as if there is only one (lef han).
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The Grammar of a Vernacular

✘ aspects of grammar that AAVE and other vernaculars are most
stigmatized as being “illogical” or “sloppy.”