Language change

• The Great Vowel Shift was the most significant sound change to occur in Middle English. A lot of longer vowel sounds were shortened.
• Periods in English

  • Old English (400 - 1100 AD)
  • Middle English (1100 - 1500 AD)
  • Early Modern English (1500 - 1700 AD)
  • Modern English (1700 - 1900 AD)
  • Present day English (like now)
• The original dweller of the UK were the Celts but they were pushed to the West when Germanic tribes like the Jutes, Angles and Saxons invaded from the East. They brought words like: werewolf, house, hound and women.
• In Old English the letters eth - ð  and thorn - Þ were used in place of th.
• What does it mean for a word to have multiple meanings?

  Polysemy
• Language change processes:

  Conversion (grammatical change) - a word shifts from one word class to another e.g., text, favourite, friend, googling and Blairite.

  Phonological change - adapting a loan word to fit a language's sound system e.g., restaurant, rendez-vous

  Semantic (change in meaning) - amelioration (wicked, bad), pejoration (villain), narrowing (meat used to generally mean food, man), broadening (web, window, mouse)
• Lexical change processes:


  Clipping - shortening a word e.g., gym

  Blending - words are abbreviated and joined together e.g. greedflation, hangry, workaholic

  Affixation - attaching suffixes or prefixes e.g. regift, accentism, deinfluencing

  Compounding - words are simply combined e.g. handheld, user-friendly, miniskirt, fake news

  Coinage/ neologism - deliberate creation of a new word e.g. widget, Lego
• Lexical change processes:

  Eponym - names as a company / person is used e.g. pampers, Blairite, Brownite

  Toponym - named after place of origin e.g. champagne, cognac, cashmere, bikini

  Acronym - first letters taken from a series of words to create a new word e.g. NATO, ULEZ

  Initialism - first letters are taken from a series of words but pronounced separately e.g. AI, UN, WHO, VAT, CD
• Reason for Language change

  
  

  • Changing attitudes to social class - universal education , more tolerance for regional accents seen in larger no. of TV presenters with regional accents
  • Film especially the popularity of Hollywood helping spread Americanisms e.g. gotten,
  • Globalisation means increased contact with different countries leads to language exchange e.g. cafeteria, gotten, coffee
  • Youth culture, since the 50's the divide between younger people and adults is reflected in language - encompassed by social media e.g. rizz, hard, techy
• Influences on English Language: culture, colonisation, literature, travel, education, technology and innovation
• William Caxton started the process of standardisation when he introduced the printing press to Britain in 1476. The Canterbury Tales were one of the first books other than the Bible to be mass produced. He chose the dialect from the East Midlands (London, Cambridge, Oxford) as the basis for Standard English.
• The Renaissance period saw a large increase in English words as a result of economic prosperity (colonisation), developments in literature and science as well as printing technology.
• Renaissance new words

  British Empire: canoe, barbeque, hurricane (Caribbean), bungalow, pyjamas, juggernaut (India), kangaroo, boomerang (Australia)

  Science: acid, ovary, gravity
• Similar to now people held prescriptivist views particularly towards inkhorn terms. An example would be Jonathan Swift (author of Gulliver's adventures) to deal with changes in the language he proposed an Academy for English, similar to the French Academy.
• The Norman Conquest of 1066 made Norman French of language of elite for numerous decades. Seen in words associated with power and law e.g. judge, jury, court, law etc. At least 10,000 English words come from French.
• Language Change Theories:

  • Lexical gaps - words are created because they fit into existing patterns in the language e.g. pip pop pup, conversions like text and affixations
  • Random fluctuation/ cultural transmission (Charles Hockett) - random errors and events create new language e.g. Credit Crunch and Brexit
  • Substratum (loan words) - influence of different languages e.g. café, restaurant
  • Functional (Michael Halliday) - language changes according to the needs of its users e.g. words like cassette and floppy disk becoming obsolete
• Language Change Theories:

  • Wave model (Bailey-1973) - change spreads out gradually from the group / region it started in, people further from the epicentre are less likely to be affected e.g. spread of Estuary English features like T glottalisation
  • S curve model (Chen-1968) - language change comes in stages, it starts slowly accelerated rapidly then slows down again e.g. Great Vowel Shift, also seen in slang
• Debates about language are often heated because they reflect people's attitudes towards other things like class, race, money and politics. (Henry Hitchings)
• Jean Aitchison's decay metaphors:


  
  

  • Damp spoon
  • Crumbling castle
  • Infectious disease
• The apostrophe was the most recent piece of punctuation to enter English orthography and there's always been inconsistency in its use. Commonly seen in London tube stations and companies like Starbucks and McDonald's. Even Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson are seen using apostrophes for plurals.