Language Change

INTENDED LEARNING OUTCOMES

 List reasons for language change

PREPARATION
Language is always changing. We've seen that language changes across space and across social
group. 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. This
lesson discusses the reasons and factors of this linguistic phenomenon.

Introductory Activity:

1. How do people use language to define themselves or to set themselves apart from others?
2. How, when, and why does language change? What kinds of people start language change?
3. What parts of speech change as people switch between different social situations? What parts
stay the same? And why?

PRESENTATION
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 change in a similar way,
through 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.

THE ANALOGY WITH EVOLUTION VIA NATURAL SELECTION

Darwin himself, in developing the concept of evolution of species via natural selection, made an
analogy to the evolution of languages. For the analogy to hold, we need a pool of individuals with
variable traits, a process of replication creating new individuals whose traits depend on those of their
"parents", and a set of environmental processes that result in differential success in replication for
different traits.

We can cast each of the just-listed types of language change in such a framework. For example,
in child language acquisition, different grammatical or different lexical patterns may be more or less
easily learnable, resulting in better replication for grammatical or lexical variants that are "fitter" in this
sense.

There are some key differences between grammars/lexicons and genotypes. For one thing,
linguistic traits can be acquired throughout one's life from many different sources, although intitial
acquisition and (to a lesser extent) adolescence seem to be crucial stages. Acquired (linguistic) traits can
also be passed on to others. One consequence is that linguistic history need not have the form of a tree,
with languages splitting but never rejoining, whereas genetic evolution is largely constrained to have a
tree-like form (despite the possibility of transfer of genetic material across species boundaries by viral
infection and so on). However, as a practical matter, the assumption that linguistic history is a sort of
tree structure has been found to be a good working approximation.

In particular, the basic sound structure and morphology of languages usually seems to
"descend" via a tree-structured graph of inheritance, with regular, lawful relationships between the
patterns of "parent" and "child" languages.

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.

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".

PRACTICE
Watch the video presentation found in this link [Link] .
Answer the following questions.

1. What is a protolanguage?
2. How can linguists determine relationships between languages?
3. What main problems do linguists face when constructing language family trees?
4. Do Filipino languages change over time? Explain your answer.
5. What foreign language do you think is closely related to your native language? Provide
examples.