ELS 201 Module 2

Types of Language Change

Language is always changing. We've seen that language changes across space and
across social groups. Language also varies across time.

Generation by generation, pronunciations evolve, new words are borrowed or

invented, the meaning of old words drifts, and morphology develops or decays. The rate
of change varies, but whether the changes are faster or slower, they build up until the
"mother tongue" becomes arbitrarily distant and different. After a thousand years, the
original and new languages will not be mutually intelligible. After ten thousand years, the
relationship will be essentially indistinguishable from chance relationships between
historically unrelated languages.

In isolated subpopulations speaking the same language, most changes will not be
shared. As a result, such subgroups will drift apart linguistically, and eventually will not
be able to understand one another.

In the modern world, language change is often socially problematic. Long before
divergent dialects lose mutual intelligibility completely, they begin to show difficulties
and inefficiencies in communication, especially under noisy or stressful conditions. Also,
as people observe language change, they usually react negatively, feeling that the
language has "gone downhill". You never seem to hear older people commenting that the
language of their children or grandchildren's generation has improved compared to the
language of their own youth.

How and why does language change?

There are many different routes to language change. Changes can take originate in
language learning, or through language contact, social differentiation, and natural
processes in usage.

Language learning: Language is transformed as it is transmitted from one

generation to the next. Each individual must re-create a grammar and lexicon based on
input received from parents, older siblings, and other members of the speech community.
The experience of each individual is different, and the process of linguistic replication is
imperfect so that the result is variable across individuals. However, a bias in the learning
process -- for instance, towards regularization -- will cause systematic drift, generation by
generation. In addition, random differences may spread and become 'fixed', especially in
small populations.

Language contact: Migration, conquest and trade bring speakers of one language
into contact with speakers of another language. Some individuals will become fully
bilingual as children, while others learn a second language more or less well as adults. In
such contact situations, languages often borrow words, sounds, constructions and so on.

Social differentiation. Social groups adopt distinctive norms of dress, adornment,

gesture and so forth; language is part of the package. Linguistic distinctiveness can be
achieved through vocabulary (slang or jargon), pronunciation (usually via exaggeration
of some variants already available in the environment), morphological processes,
syntactic constructions, and so on.

Natural processes in usage. Rapid or casual speech naturally produces processes

such as assimilation, dissimilation, syncope, and apocope. Through repetition, particular
cases may become conventionalized, and therefore produced even in slower or more
careful speech. Word meaning changes in a similar way, through the conventionalization
of processes like metaphor and metonymy.

Some linguists distinguish between internal and external sources of language

change, with "internal" sources of change being those that occur within a single linguistic
community, and contact phenomena being the main examples of an external source of
change.

How do language changes spread?

1- From group to group: changes spread like waves in different directions, and social
factors such as age, gender, status, and social group affect the rates and directions
of change.
2- From style to style: from more formal to more casual, from one individual to
another, from one social group to another, and from one word to another.
3- Lexical diffusion: the change from one word's vowel to another, the sound change
begins in one word and later on in another, etc.

How do we study language change?

1. Apparent-time studies of language change: it is the study of comparing the speech
of people from different age groups, to find out any differences that could indicate
change (whether an increase or decrease).
 2. Studying language change in real-time: in this study, the researcher studies the
language in a community and then comes back to it after a number of years to
study it again, and find out any changes.

Reasons for language change

According to Holmes, there are three reasons for language changes:

a. Social status
b. Sex
c. Interaction

On the other hand, a lot of studies suggest that there are two reasons; internal and
external. The internal reasons are referred to as the causes of the nature of language itself
while the external reasons are referred to as the situations found in the society using the
language that triggers the change.

Internal reason
Example of internal reason: the change from the sound of /ng/found in the words
such as reading, going, seeing (Standard English Variety) into /n/ (non-Standard English
Variety).

The external reasons

a. Immigration of the language speaker = English has been changing since the
speaker from England to American land, Australia, Canada, etc.
b. The invention of technology = computer device the word mouse, the word
WWW (World Wide Web) = surfing it means searching or visiting net sites
c. The economic and social values of a language = when a lot of people around
the world believe that English has more economic value and social prestige,
they will choose to learn its instead of others.
d. Political situation = idiolects of political leaders (the presidents, a political
party leader, etc) sometimes evoke a change of language treatment of a variety
of the language used in society.

Types of Change
Sound change
All aspects of language change and a great deal is known about general
mechanisms and historical details of changes at all levels of linguistic analysis. However,
a special and conspicuous success has been achieved in modeling changes in
phonological systems, traditionally called sound change. In the cases where we have
access to several historical stages -- for instance, the development of the modern
Romance Languages from Latin -- these sound changes are remarkably regular.
Techniques developed in such cases permit us to reconstruct the sound system -- and
some of the vocabulary -- of unattested parent languages from information about
daughter languages.

In some cases, an old sound becomes a new sound across the board. Such a change
occurred in Hawai'ian, in that all the "t" sounds in an older form of the language became
"k"s: at the time Europeans encountered Hawai'ian, there were no "t"s in it at all, though
the closely related languages Tahitian, Samoan, Tongan and Maori all have "t"s.

Processes of sound change.

Another dimension along which we can look at sound change is by classifying
changes according to the particular process involved.

Assimilation, or the influence of one sound on an adjacent sound, is perhaps the most
pervasive process. Assimilation processes changed Latin /k/ when followed by /i/
or /y/, first to /ky/, then to "ch", then to /s/, so that Latin faciat /fakiat/ 'would make'
became fasse /fas/ in Modern French (the subjunctive of the verb faire 'to
make').Palatalization is a kind of assimilation.

In contrast to assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis, and haplology tend to occur

more sporadically, i.e., to affect individual words. Dissimilation involves a change in
one of two 'same' sounds that are adjacent or almost adjacent in a particular word such
that they are no longer the same. Thus the first "l" in English colonel is changed to an
"r", and the word is pronounced like "kernel". Metathesis involves the change in
order of two adjacent sounds. Crystal cites Modern English third from OE thrid , and
Modern English bird is a parallel example. But Modern English bright underwent the
opposite change, its ancestor being beorht, and not all "vowel + r" words changed the
relative order of these segments as happened with bird and third . Already by the
time of Old English, there were two forms of the word for "ask": ascian and acsian.
We don't know which form was metathesized from the other, but we do know
that ascian won out in the standard language. Haplology is similar to dissimilation,
because it involves getting rid of similar neighboring sounds, but this time, one sound
is simply dropped out rather than being changed to a different sound. An example is
the pronunciation of Modern English probably as prob'ly.

Other sound change processes are merger, split, loss, syncope, apocope,

prothesis, and epenthesis. Merger and split can be seen as the mirror image of each
other. A merger that is currently expanding over much of the United States is the
merger between "short o" and "long open o". The following table contains
examples of words that you probably pronounce differently if you are from the
Philadelphia - New York - New England area, or if you are from the South. If you are
from Canada, the American Midwest, or from California, you probably find that the
vowels in these pairs sound the same, rather than different. If this is the case, you have
a merger here.

Short "o" Long "Open o"

cot caught
hot haughty
hock hawk
stock stalk

Splits are rarer than mergers, and usually arise when a formerly conditioned
alternation loses the environment that provided the original conditioning, and the
previously conditioned alternation becomes two independent sounds that contrast with
each other. This is basically what happened when /f/ and /v/ split in English
(/v/ having previously been an alternate of /f/ when /f/ occurred in an intervocalic
position).

Loss involves the loss of a sound from a language, as when Hawai'ian lost the /t/ in
favor of /k/ (see below).

Syncope and apocope are the loss of medial and final sounds respectively. Middle

English 'tame' in the past tense was /temede/. It lost both its medial and final vowels
to become Modern English /teymd/. These are usually conditioned changes that do
not involve loss of the same sound elsewhere.

Prothesis and epenthesis are the introduction of additional sounds, initially and

medially respectively. The addition of the /e/ that made Latin words like scola 'school'
into Portuguese escola is the only example of prothesis in foure historical linguistics
textbooks I consulted. As for epenthesis, an example other than the one Crystal cites
was the /d/ inserted into ME thunrian to give us the Modern English thunder.

Assignment:

Is language change an advantage or disadvantage? Why or why not?

 Write your answer on a piece of paper and take a photo of it. Make your
penmanship as clear as possible.

Note: If you read this, submit your assignment actual time, Wednesday for MWF
and Thursday for TTH. Do not notify your classmates or friends. This is to find out who
is reading the modules and who is not.