Causes of Language Change

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. o

The principle The principle of least effort tends effort tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms. See vowel reduction, reduction, cluster reduction, reduction, lenition lenition,, and elision elision.. fter some time a change may become widely accepted !it becomes a regular sound regular sound change" change" and may end up treated as a standard. #or instance: going instance: going to $ to $ˈɡoʊ.ɪ%. %.tʊ& ' gonna $ˈɡɔn(& n(& or or $ˈɡʌn(&, n(&, with with e)am e)ampl ples es of bot both vow vowel el redu reduct ctiion $ʊ & ' $(& $(& and and elis elisio ion n $nt& ' $n&, $oʊ.ɪ & ' $ʌ&.

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nalogy:: reducing word forms by likening different forms of the word to the root. nalogy

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*anguage contact: contact: borrowing of words and constructions from other languages.$+&

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eographic separation: when people move away from each other, their language will diverge, at least for the vocabulary, due to different e)periences.$&

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ultural environment: environment: roups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and ob/ects in their language, whether they encounter different people there or not.

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0igration10ovement: Speakers will change and create languages, such as pidgins and creoles.$2&

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3mperfect learning: ccording to one view, children regularly learn the adult forms imperfectly, and the changed forms then turn into a new standard. lternatively, lternatively, imperfect learning occurs regularly in one part of society, such as an immigrant group, where the minority language forms a substratum substratum,, and the changed forms can ultimately influences $& ma/ority usage.

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Social prestige: *anguage may not only change towards a prestigious accent, but also away from one with negative prestige,$& as in the case of rhoticity of 4eceived Pronunciation..$5& Such movements can go back and forward.$6& Pronunciation

ccording to uy 7eutscher , the tricky 8uestion is 9hy are changes not brought up short and stopped in their tracks; t first sight, there seem to be all the reasons in the world wh y society should never let the changes through.9 & and do so in many and varied ways. 0arcel ohen details various types of language change under the overall headings of the external evolution $?& and internal evolution  of languages.$@& Lexical changes The study of le)ical changes forms the diachronic portion of the science of onomasiology.

The ongoing influ) of new words into the English language !for e)ample" 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. 7ictionary-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 e)isting words. Ay the same token, they may tag some words eventually as 9archaic9 or 9obsolete9. Phonetic and phonological changes Main articles: Sound change and Phonological change

The concept of sound change covers both phonetic and phonological developments. The sociolinguist illiam *abov recorded the change in pronunciation in a relatively short  period in the merican resort of 0artha=s Bineyard and showed how this resulted from social tensions and processes.$+C& Even in the relatively short time that broadcast media hav e recorded their work, one can observe the difference between the pronunciation of the newsreaders of the +@5Cs and the +@6Cs and the pronunciation of today. The greater acceptance and fashionability of  regional accents in media may$original research?& also reflect a more democratic, less formal society D 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 +@th century. ritten te)ts  provide the main !indirect" evidence of how language sounds have changed over the centuries. Aut note #erdinand de Saussure=s work on postulating the e)istence and disappearance of laryngeals in Proto-3ndo-European as an e)ample of other methods of detecting1reconstructing sound-changes within historical linguistics. Poetic devices such as rhyme and rhythm may  provide clues to previous phonological habits.

Spelling changes Standardisation of spelling originated relatively recently.$citation needed & 7ifferences in spelling often catch the eye of a reader of a te)t from a previous century. The pre-print era had fewer literate  people: languages lacked fi)ed systems of orthography, and the handwritten manuscripts that survive often show words spelled according to regional pronunciation and to personal  preference. Semantic changes Main article: Semantic change

Semantic changes are shifts in the meanings of e)isting words. Aasic types of semantic change include: •

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

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amelioration, in which a term's connotations become more positive

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broadening, in which a term acquires additional potential uses

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narrowing, in which a term's potential uses are restricted

fter a word enters a language, its meaning can change as through a shift in the valence of its connotations. s an e)ample, when 9villain9 entered English it meant =peasant= or =farmhand=, but ac8uired the connotation =low-born= or =scoundrel=, and today only the negative use survives. Thus =villain= has undergone pe/oration. onversely, the word 9wicked9 is undergoing amelioration in collo8uial conte)ts, shifting from its original sense of =evil=, to the much more positive one as of CC@ of =brilliant=. ords= meanings may also change in terms of the breadth of their semantic domain. arrowing a word limits its alternative meanings, whereas broadening associates new meanings with it. #or e)ample, 9hound9 !Fld English hund " once referred to any dog, whereas in modern English it denotes only a particular type of canid. Fn the other hand, the word 9dog9 has been broadened from its Fld English root =dogge=, the name o f a particular breed, to become the general term for all canines.$++& Syntactic change Main article: Syntactic change

Syntactic change is the evolution of the syntactic structure of a natural language. Fver time, syntactic change is the greatest modifier of a particular language. 0assive changes attributable either to creoliGation or to rele)ification - may occur both in synta) and in vocabulary.

Sociolinguistics and language change

The sociolinguist Hennifer oates, following illiam *abov, describes linguistic change as occurring in the conte)t of linguistic heterogeneity. She e)plains that I$l&inguistic change can be said to have taken place when a new linguistic form, used by some sub-group within a speech community, is adopted by other members of that community and accepted as the norm.J$+& an and Patton !C+C" provide a 8uantitative analysis of twentieth century Turkish literature using forty novels of forty authors. Ksing weighted least s8uares regression and a sliding window approach, they show that, as time passes, words, in terms of both tokens !in te)t" 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 IreformJ of the Cth century. This reform aimed at replacing foreign words used in Turkish, especially rabic- and Persian-based words !since they were in ma/ority when the reform was initiated in early +@2Cs", with newly coined pure Turkish neologisms created by adding suffi)es to Turkish word stems !*ewis, +@@@". an and Patton !C+C", 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 rabic 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. uantifying language change

ltintas, an, and Patton !CC>" introduce a systematic approach to language change 8uantification by studying unconsciously-used language features in time-separated parallel translations. #or this purpose, they use ob/ective style markers such as vo cabulary richness and lengths of words, word stems and suffi)es, and employ statistical methods to measure their changes over time. !anguage shift and social status Main article: !anguage shift

*anguages perceived to be 9higher status9 stabilise or spread at the e)pense of other languages  perceived by their own speakers to be 9lower-status9.