Language change 1

Language changeLanguage change is variation over time in a language's phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and otherfeatures.

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 effort: Speakers especially use economy in their articulation, which tends to result in

phonetic reduction of speech forms. See vowel reduction, cluster reduction, lenition, and elision. After sometime a change may become widely accepted (it becomes a regular sound change) and may end up treated as astandard. For instance: going to [ˈɡoʊ.ɪŋ.tʊ] → gonna [ˈɡɔnə] or [ˈɡʌnə], with examples of both vowelreduction [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 foreign languages.• The medium of communication.• Cultural environment: Groups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and objects in their language,

whether they encounter different people there or not.

Types of language changeAll languages change constantly, and do so in many and varied ways.Marcel Cohen details various types of language change under the overall headings of the external evolution[1] andinternal evolution of languages.[2]

Lexical changesThe study of lexical changes forms the diachronic 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 investigationinto language change, despite the difficulty of defining precisely and accurately the vocabulary available to speakersof English. Throughout its history English has not only borrowed words from other languages but has re-combinedand 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 ina 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 changesThe 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 Americanresort of Martha's Vineyard and showed how this resulted from social tensions and processes.[3] Even in therelatively short time that broadcast media have recorded their work, one can observe the difference between thepronunciation of the newsreaders of the 1940s and the 1950s and the pronunciation of today. The greater acceptanceand fashionability of regional accents in media may also reflect a more democratic, less formal society — comparethe 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

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of how language sounds have changed over the centuries . But note Ferdinand de Saussure's work on postulating theexistence and disappearance of laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European as an example of other methods ofdetecting/reconstructing sound-changes within historical linguistics.

Spelling changesStandardisation of spelling originated relatively recently. Differences in spelling often catch the eye of a reader of atext from a previous century. The pre-print era had fewer literate people: languages lacked fixed systems oforthography, and the handwritten manuscripts that survive often show words spelled according to regionalpronunciation and to personal preference.

Semantic changesSemantic changes are shifts in meaning of the existing words. They include:• pejoration, in which a term acquires a negative association• amelioration, 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 changeThe sociolinguist Jennifer Coates, following William Labov, describes linguistic change as occurring in the contextof linguistic heterogeneity. She explains that “[l]inguistic change can be said to have taken place when a newlinguistic form, used by some sub-group within a speech community, is adopted by other members of thatcommunity and accepted as the norm.”[4]

Can and Patton (2010) provide a quantitative analysis of twentieth century Turkish literature using forty novels offorty authors. Using weighted least squares regression and a sliding window approach, they show that, as timepasses, words, in terms of both tokens (in text) and types (in vocabulary), have become longer. They indicate that theincrease in word lengths with time can be attributed to the government-initiated language “reform” of the 20thcentury. 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 Turkishneologisms 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 newerworks the preference of ama over fakat, both borrowed from Arabic and meaning 'but', and their inverse usagecorrelation is statistically significant), also speculate that the word length increase can influence the common wordchoice preferences of authors.

Quantifying language changeAltintas, Can, and Patton (2007) introduce a systematic approach to language change quantification by studyingunconsciously-used language features in time-separated parallel translations. For this purpose, they use objectivestyle markers such as vocabulary richness and lengths of words, word stems and suffixes, and employ statisticalmethods to measure their changes over time.

Language shift and social statusLanguages perceived to be "higher status" stabilise or spread at the expense of other languages perceived by theirown speakers to be "lower-status".

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Historical examples are the early Welsh and Lutheran bible translations, leading to the liturgical languages Welshand High German thriving today, unlike other Celtic or German variants.[5]

For prehistory, Forster and Renfrew (2011) [6] argue that in some cases there is a correlation of language change withintrusive 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 theabduction of British women by Vikings to Iceland) causes immigration of at least some males, and perceived statuschange. Then, in mixed-language marriages with these males, prehistoric women would often have chosen totransmit the "higher-status" spouse's language to their children, yielding the language/Y-chromosome correlationseen today.

Notes[1] Cohen, Marcel (1975) [1970]. Language: its structure and evolution. Translated by Leonard Muller. London: Souvenir Press (Educational &

Academic). pp. 74–98. ISBN 0-285-64779-2. "[...] the shifting movements of languages in light of whatever knowledge is available of thehistory of humanity."

[2] Cohen, Marcel (1975) [1970]. Language: its structure and evolution. Translated by Leonard Muller. London: Souvenir Press (Educational &Academic). pp. 98–141. ISBN 0-285-64779-2. "Internal evolution [...] is the passing from one system to another. [...] Internal evolutionproceeds progressively, by modification and substitution of details. It is the sum of these details which, at the end of a certain period of time,constitutes a total change."

[3] William Labov, 1963. "The social motivation of a sound change." Word 19.273-309[4][4] Coates, 1992: 169[5] Barker, Christopher (1588). The Bible in Welsh (http:/ / www. joh. cam. ac. uk/ library/ special_collections/ early_books/ pix/ welsh. htm).

London. .[6] Forster P, Renfrew C (2011). "Mother tongue and Y chromosomes" (http:/ / www. rootsforreal. com/ press_en. php). Science 333:

1390–1391. .

ReferencesJournals• Altintas, K.; Can, F.; Patton, J. M. (2007). "Language Change Quantification Using Time-separated Parallel

Translations". Literary and Linguistic Computing 22 (4): 375–393. doi:10.1093/llc/fqm026.• Can, F.; Patton, J. M. (2010). "Change of Word Characteristics in 20th Century Turkish Literature: A Statistical

Analysis". Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 17 (3): 167–190. doi:10.1080/09296174.2010.485444.Books• Coates, Jennifer (1993). Women, men, and language: a sociolinguistic account of gender differences in language

(http:/ / books. google. com/ books?id=aFFsAAAAIAAJ). Studies in language and linguistics (2 ed.). Longman.pp. 228. ISBN 978-0-582-07492-7. Retrieved 2010-03-30.

• Labov, William (1994, 2001), Principles of Linguistic Change (vol.I Internal Factors, 1994; vol.II SocialFactors, 2001), Blackwell.

• Lewis, G. (1999). The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success. Oxford : Oxford University Press.• Wardhaugh, R. (1986), An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Oxford/ New York.Other• Wittmann, H. (1983), "Les réactions en chaîne en morphologie diachronique" (http:/ / ebookbrowse. com/

1983c-morphodia-pdf-d132946041). Actes du Colloque de la Société internationale de linguistique fonctionnelle10.285–92.

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External links• Sounds Familiar? (http:/ / www. bl. uk/ soundsfamiliar) The British Library website provides audio examples of

changing accents and dialects from across the UK.

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