Causes of
language change
1. 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 some time a change may
become widely accepted (it becomes a regular sound change) and may end up treated as a
standard. For instance: going to [ˈɡoʊ.ɪntʊ] →gonna [ˈɡʌnə], with examples of both vowel reduction [ʊ] → [ə] and elision [nt] → [n], [oʊ.ɪ] → [ʌ].
2. analogy - reducing word forms by
likening different forms of the word to the root.
3. language contact - the borrowing of words from
foreign languages.
5. 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 change
All languages change constantly, and do so in many and varied ways. Each
generation notes how other generations "talk funny". Marcel Cohen
details various types of language change under the overall headings of the
external evolution and internal evolution of languages.
Lexical changes
The 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 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 as "archaic" or "obsolete".
Phonetic and phonological changes
The 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 American resort of Martha’s Vineyard and showed how this resulted from social tensions and processes.[4] Even in the relatively short
time that broadcast media have recorded their work, one can observe the
difference between the pronunciation of the
newsreaders of the 1940s and the 1950s and the pronunciation of today. The
greater acceptance and fashionability of regional accents in media may also
reflect a more democratic, less formal society — 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 19th
century. Written texts provide the main (indirect) evidence of how language
sounds have changed over the centuries. But note Ferdinand de Saussure's work on postulating the existence and disappearance
of laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European as an example of other methods of
detecting/reconstructing sound-changes within historical linguistics.
Spelling changes
Standardization of spelling originated relatively
recently.[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 handwritten manuscripts
that survive often show words spelled according to regional pronunciation and
to personal preference.
Semantic changes
Semantic changes 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
Variation
and Change: the cause behind language change
is the variation of use in the areas of pronunciation and vocabulary.
Post-vocal |r| its spread and its status: In many parts of
England and Wales, Standard English has lost the pronunciation post-vocal r.
The loss of r began in the 17th century in the south-east of England and is still
spreading to other areas. Accents with post-vocal |r| are called rhotict, and
these accents are regarded as rural and uneducated. On the other hand in cities
like New York, pronouncing the letter r is regarded as prestigious.
The spread of vernacular forms: sometimes a vernacular
feature in some communities as a reflection of ethnic or social identity such
as what happened in Martha's Vineyard Island. Labov's 1960 study showed: when
the island was invaded by summer tourists, the island community of fishermen
changed their pronunciation of some word vowels to older forms from the past as
a reaction to the language of tourists.
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.
references
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_(linguistics)
Holmes, Janet
(2001) 2nd edn An Introduction To Sociolinguistics.
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