Language change

Language change is the process of alteration in the features of a single language, or of

languages in general, across a period of time. It is studied in several subfields
of linguistics: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistics. Traditional
theories of historical linguistics identify three main types of change: systematic change in the
pronunciation of phonemes, or sound change; borrowing, in which features of a language or
dialect are introduced or altered as a result of influence from another language or dialect;
and analogical change, in which the shape or grammatical behavior of a word is altered to more
closely resemble that of another word.

Language change usually does not occur suddenly, but rather takes place via an extended period
of variation, during which new and old linguistic features coexist. All living languages are
continually undergoing change. Some commentators use derogatory labels such as "corruption"
to suggest that language change constitutes a degradation in the quality of a language, especially
when the change originates from human error or is a prescriptively discouraged usage. Modern
linguistics rejects this concept, since from a scientific point of view such innovations cannot be
judged in terms of good or bad. John Lyons notes that "any standard of evaluation applied to
language-change must be based upon a recognition of the various functions a language 'is called
upon' to fulfil in the society which uses it".

Over a sufficiently long period of time, changes in a language can accumulate to such an extent
that it is no longer recognizable as the same language. For instance, modern English is the result
of centuries of language change applying to Old English, even though modern English is
extremely divergent from Old English in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. The two may
be thought of as distinct languages, but Modern English is a "descendant" of its "ancestor" Old
English. When multiple languages are all descended from the same ancestor language, as
the Romance languages are from Vulgar Latin, they are said to form a language family and be
"genetically" related.

Causes of language change

 Economy: Speech communities tend to change their utterances to be as efficient and

effective (with as little effort) as possible, while still reaching communicative goals.
Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs and benefits.
 The principle of least effort tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech
forms. See vowel reduction, cluster reduction, lenition, and elision. After
some time, a change may become widely accepted (it becomes a
regular sound change) and may end up treated as standard. For
instance: going to [ˈɡoʊ.ɪŋ.tʊ] → gonna [ˈɡɔnə] or [ˈɡʌnə], with examples
of both vowel reduction [ʊ] → [ə] and elision [nt] → [n], [oʊ.ɪ] → [ʌ].
 Expressiveness: Common or overused language tends to lose its emotional or
rhetorical intensity over time; therefore, new words and constructions are
continuously employed to revive that intensity
 Analogy: Over time, speech communities unconsciously apply patterns of rules in
certain words, sounds, etc. to unrelated other words, sounds, etc.
  Language contact: Words and constructions are borrowed from one language into
another.
 Cultural environment: As a culture evolves, new places, situations, and objects
inevitably enter its language, whether or not the culture encounters different people.
 Migration/Movement: Speech communities, moving into a region with a new or more
complex linguistic situation, will influence, and be influenced by, language change;
they sometimes even end up with entirely new languages, such as pidgins and
creoles.
 Imperfect learning: According to one view, children regularly learn the adult forms
imperfectly, and the changed forms then turn into a new standard. Alternatively,
imperfect learning occurs regularly in one part of society, such as an immigrant
group, where the minority language forms a substratum, and the changed forms can
ultimately influence majority usage.[7]
 Social prestige: A language change towards adopting features that have more
social prestige, or away from ones with negative prestige, [7] as in the case of the loss
of rhoticity in the British Received Pronunciation accent.[8] Such movements can go
back and forth.[9]
According to Guy Deutscher, the tricky question is "Why are changes not brought up short and
stopped in their tracks? At first sight, there seem to be all the reasons in the world why society
should never let the changes through." He sees the reason for tolerating change in the fact that
we already are used to "synchronic variation", to the extent that we are hardly aware of it. For
example, when we hear the word "wicked", we automatically interpret it as either "evil" or
"wonderful", depending on whether it is uttered by an elderly lady or a teenager. Deutscher
speculates that "[i]n a hundred years' time, when the original meaning of 'wicked' has all but
been forgotten, people may wonder how it was ever possible for a word meaning 'evil' to change
its sense to 'wonderful' so quickly."[5]

Types of language change

Phonetic and phonological changes
[edit]
Sound change—i.e., change in the pronunciation of phonemes—can lead to phonological
change (i.e., change in the relationships between phonemes within the structure of a language).
For instance, if the pronunciation of one phoneme changes to become identical to that of another
phoneme, the two original phonemes can merge into a single phoneme, reducing the total
number of phonemes the language contains.

Determining the exact course of sound change in historical languages can pose difficulties, since
the technology of sound recording dates only from the 19th century, and thus sound changes
before that time must be inferred from written texts. The orthographical practices of historical
writers provide the main (indirect) evidence of how language sounds have changed over the
centuries. Poetic devices such as rhyme and rhythm can also provide clues to earlier phonetic and
phonological patterns.

A principal axiom of historical linguistics, established by the linguists of

the Neogrammarian school of thought in the 19th century, is that sound change is said to be
"regular"—i.e., a given sound change simultaneously affects all words in which the relevant set
of phonemes appears, rather than each word's pronunciation changing independently of each
other. The degree to which the Neogrammarian hypothesis is an accurate description of how
sound change takes place, rather than a useful approximation, is controversial; but it has proven
extremely valuable to historical linguistics as a heuristic, and enabled the development of
methodologies of comparative reconstruction and internal reconstruction that allow linguists to
extrapolate backwards from known languages to the properties of earlier, unattested
languages and hypothesize sound changes that may have taken place in them.

Lexical changes
The study of lexical changes forms the diachronic portion of the science of onomasiology.

The ongoing influx of new words into 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 eventually as "archaic" or "obsolete".

Spelling changes
Standardisation of spelling originated centuries ago.[vague][citation needed] 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 manuscripts that
survived often show words spelled according to regional pronunciation and to personal
preference.

Semantic changes
Semantic changes are shifts in the meanings of existing words. Basic types of semantic change
include:

 pejoration, in which a term's connotation goes from positive to negative

 amelioration, in which a term's connotations goes from negative to (more) positive
 broadening, in which a term acquires additional potential uses
 narrowing, in which a term's potential uses become more restrictive
After a word enters a language, its meaning can change as through a shift in the valence of its
connotations. As an example, when "villain" entered English it meant 'peasant' or 'farmhand', but
acquired the connotation 'low-born' or 'scoundrel', and today only the negative use survives. Thus
'villain' has undergone pejoration. Conversely, the word "wicked" is undergoing amelioration in
colloquial contexts, shifting from its original sense of 'evil', to the much more positive one as of
2009 of 'brilliant'.
Words' meanings may also change in terms of the breadth of their semantic domain. Narrowing a
word limits its alternative meanings, whereas broadening associates new meanings with it. For
example, "hound" (Old English hund) once referred to any dog, whereas in modern English it
denotes only a particular type of dog. On the other hand, the word "dog" itself has been
broadened from its Old English root 'dogge', the name of a particular breed, to become the
general term for all domestic canines.[10]

Syntactic change
Syntactic change is the evolution of the syntactic structure of a natural language.

Over time, syntactic change is the greatest modifier of a particular language. [citation needed] Massive
changes – attributable either to creolization or to relexification – may occur both in syntax and in
vocabulary. Syntactic change can also be purely language-internal, whether independent within
the syntactic component or the eventual result of phonological or morphological change. [ci