Language change
Encyclopedia
Language change is the phenomenon whereby phonetic
, morphological
, semantic
, syntactic
, and other features of language
vary over time. The effect on language over time is known as diachronic change
. Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern themselves with studying language change: historical linguistics
and sociolinguistics
. Historical linguists examine how people in the past used language and seek to determine how subsequent languages derive from previous ones and relate to one another. Sociolinguists study the origins of language changes and want to explain how society and changes in society influence language.
Rudi Keller discusses language change in the context of evolution
ary process: "the historical evolution of language", proposing his invisible hand explanation
.
Marcel Cohen details various types of language change under the overall headings of the external evolution
and internal evolution of languages.
portion of the science of onomasiology
.
The ongoing influx of new words in 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 as "archaic" or "obsolete".
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.
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 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
.
originated relatively recently. 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.
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.”
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, both in terms of 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”, where both are borrowed from Arabic and mean “but” in English, and their inverse usage correlation is statistically significant), also speculate that the word length increase can influence the common word choice preferences of authors.
Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...
, morphological
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
, semantic
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
, syntactic
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
, and other features of language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
vary over time. The effect on language over time is known as diachronic change
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
. Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern themselves with studying language change: historical linguistics
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
and sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society...
. Historical linguists examine how people in the past used language and seek to determine how subsequent languages derive from previous ones and relate to one another. Sociolinguists study the origins of language changes and want to explain how society and changes in society influence language.
Causes of language change
- 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 effortPrinciple of least effortThe principle of least effort is a broad theory that covers diverse fields from evolutionary biology to webpage design. It postulates that animals, people, even well designed machines will naturally choose the path of least resistance or "effort". It is closely related to many other similar...
: Speakers especially use economy in their articulation, which tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms. See vowel reductionVowel reductionIn phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels, which are related to changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word , and which are perceived as "weakening"...
, cluster reductionCluster reductionIn phonology and historical linguistics, cluster reduction is the simplification of consonant clusters in certain environments or over time.In some dialects of English such as AAVE certain historical consonant clusters reduce to single consonants at the ends of words: friend rhymes with Ben, and...
, lenitionLenitionIn linguistics, lenition is a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" . Lenition can happen both synchronically and diachronically...
, and elisionElisionElision is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase, producing a result that is easier for the speaker to pronounce...
. After some time a change may become widely accepted (it becomes a regular sound changeSound changeSound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation or sound system structures...
) and may end up treated as a standard. For instance: going to [ˈɡoʊ.ɪntʊ] → gonna [ˈɡʌnə], with examples of both vowel reduction [ʊ] → [ə] and elision [nt] → [n], [oʊ.ɪ] → [ʌ].
- the principle of least effort
- analogyAnalogyAnalogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another particular subject , and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process...
- reducing word forms by likening different forms of the word to the root. - language contactLanguage contactLanguage contact occurs when two or more languages or varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics.Multilingualism has likely been common throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual...
- the borrowing of words from foreign languages. - the medium of communicationMedia (communication)In communications, media are the storage and transmission channels or tools used to store and deliver information or data...
- cultural environmentCultureCulture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
: Groups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and objects in their language, whether they encounter different people there or not.
Rudi Keller discusses language change in the context of evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
ary process: "the historical evolution of language", proposing his invisible hand explanation
Invisible hand explanation
The German linguist Rudi Keller, holds the view that language change and the alteration of language use is caused by an “invisible hand”. The term invisible hand itself was shaped by Adam Smith and is generally known and established in economics....
.
Types of language change
All languages change constantly, and do so in many and varied ways. Each generation notes how other generations "talk funny".Marcel Cohen details various types of language change under the overall headings of the external evolution
and internal evolution of languages.
Lexical changes
The study of lexical changes forms the diachronicDiachronic
Diachronic or Diachronous,from the Greek word Διαχρονικός , is a term for something happening over time. It is used in several fields of research.*Diachronic linguistics : see Historical linguistics...
portion of the science of onomasiology
Onomasiology
Onomasiology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the question "how do you express X?" It is in fact most commonly understood as a branch of lexicology, the study of words .Onomasiology, as a part of lexicology, starts from a concept which is taken to be priorOnomasiology (from — to name,...
.
The ongoing influx of new words in the English language
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
(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
History of the English language
English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic invaders from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the Netherlands. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the...
English has not only borrowed words
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
from other languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings, whilst losing some old words
Changes to Old English vocabulary
Many words that existed in Old English did not survive into Modern English. There are also many words in Modern English that bear little or no resemblance in meaning to their Old English etymons. Some linguists estimate that as much as 80 percent of the lexicon of Old English was lost by the end...
.
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 as "archaic" or "obsolete".
Phonetic and phonological changes
The concept of sound changeSound change
Sound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation or sound system structures...
covers both phonetic and phonological
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
developments.
The sociolinguist William Labov
William Labov
William Labov born December 4, 1927) is an American linguist, widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics...
recorded the change in pronunciation
Pronunciation
Pronunciation refers to the way a word or a language is spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If one is said to have "correct pronunciation", then it refers to both within a particular dialect....
in a relatively short period in the American resort of Martha’s Vineyard and showed how this resulted from social tensions and processes.
Even in the relatively short time that broadcast media have recorded their work, one can observe the difference between the pronunciation
Received Pronunciation
Received Pronunciation , also called the Queen's English, Oxford English or BBC English, is the accent of Standard English in England, with a relationship to regional accents similar to the relationship in other European languages between their standard varieties and their regional forms...
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 also reflect a more democratic, less formal society — compare the widespread adoption of language policies
Language policy
Many countries have a language policy designed to favour or discourage the use of a particular language or set of languages. Although nations historically have used language policies most often to promote one official language at the expense of others, many countries now have policies designed to...
.
The mapping and recording of small-scale phonological changes poses difficulties, especially as the practical technology of sound recording
Sound recording and reproduction
Sound recording and reproduction is an electrical or mechanical inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital 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
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
's work on postulating the existence and disappearance of laryngeals
Laryngeal theory
The laryngeal theory is a generally accepted theory of historical linguistics which proposes the existence of one, or a set of three , consonant sounds termed "laryngeals" that appear in most current reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language...
in Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language
The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
as an example of other methods of detecting/reconstructing sound-changes within historical linguistics
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
.
Spelling changes
Standardisation of spellingSpelling
Spelling is the writing of one or more words with letters and diacritics. In addition, the term often, but not always, means an accepted standard spelling or the process of naming the letters...
originated relatively recently. Differences in spelling often catch the eye of a reader of a text from a previous century. The pre-print era had fewer literate
Literacy
Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...
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
Semantic changes include- pejoration, in which a term acquires a negative association
- ameliorationAmeliorationAmelioration may refer to one of the following:*Amelioration means "to make better" or "to improve upon" most often in context of or in reference to ill health of a person but could also be in reference to healing the land, plant, tree, etc....
, in which a term acquires a positive association - widening, in which a term acquires a broader meaning
- narrowing, in which a term acquires a narrower meaning
Sociolinguistics and language change
The sociolinguistSociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society...
Jennifer Coates, following William Labov
William Labov
William Labov born December 4, 1927) is an American linguist, widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of the methodology" of sociolinguistics...
, 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.”
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, both in terms of 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”, where both are borrowed from Arabic and mean “but” in English, and their inverse usage correlation is statistically significant), also speculate that the word length increase can influence the common word choice preferences of authors.
Quantifying language change
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.See also
- Evolutionary linguisticsEvolutionary linguisticsEvolutionary linguistics is the scientific study of the origins and development of language. The main challenge in this research is the lack of empirical data: spoken language leaves practically no traces. This led to an abandonment of the field for more than a century...
- Historical linguisticsHistorical linguisticsHistorical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
- Invisible hand explanationInvisible hand explanationThe German linguist Rudi Keller, holds the view that language change and the alteration of language use is caused by an “invisible hand”. The term invisible hand itself was shaped by Adam Smith and is generally known and established in economics....
- Wave model (linguistics)Wave model (linguistics)In historical linguistics, the wave model or wave theory is a model of language change in which new features of a language spread from a central point in continuously weakening concentric circles, similar to the waves created when a stone is thrown into a body of water. According to the model,...
- Neologism
- CalqueCalqueIn linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation.-Calque:...
- Phono-semantic matchingPhono-semantic matchingPhono-semantic matching is a linguistic term referring to camouflaged borrowing in which a foreign word is matched with a phonetically and semantically similar pre-existent native word/root....
- Origin of languageOrigin of languageThe origin of language is the emergence of language in the human species. This is a highly controversial topic. Empirical evidence is so limited that many regard it as unsuitable for serious scholars. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject...
- Oxford English DictionaryOxford English DictionaryThe Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
- SociolinguisticsSociolinguisticsSociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society...
- William CaxtonWilliam CaxtonWilliam Caxton was an English merchant, diplomat, writer and printer. As far as is known, he was the first English person to work as a printer and the first to introduce a printing press into England...
External links
- Sounds Familiar? The British Library website provides audio examples of changing accents and dialects from across the UK.