Language Change

• Historical influences 


  450 AD - Latin words inherited from the church

  1400s - The Great Vowel Shift

  1476 - Caxton’s printing press

  1755 - Johnson’s Dictionary, removed words he didn’t like

  1806 - Webster’s Dictionary, aimed to promote American spelling
• Processes


  Broadening

  Narrowing

  Amelioration

  Pejoration

  Coinage

  Compounding

  Clipping

  Borrowing

  Archaism
• Prescriptivist 


  want language to stay the same, has standards to follow
• Descriptivist 


  no judgement of language change
• Aitchison’s metaphors 


  The infectious disease - poor language is spread like a disease

  The crumbling castle - time breaks down language

  The damp spoon - language change is due to laziness
• Change types


  Synchronic - look at current language

  Diachronic - language change over time
• Milroy - No ‘Golden Age’ of language 


  no golden age, always evolving, all of society are never perfectly literate
• Tree model 


  language varies through generations
• Schmidt - Wave model (1872)


  new words spread at different rates, then fizzle out
• Bailey - Wave model ( 1973)


  language change impacted by geographical distance, word from USA will be used less in China

  cons - Trudgill (1974)

  • flow is not this smooth
  • not all countries receive all neologisms
• S - Curve model - Chen and Bailey 


  change in language starts off slow, rapidly increases, then levels off
• David Crystal (2011)


  “all living languages change. They have to... the only languages that don’t change are dead ones.”
• Substratum theory 


  language is learnt imperfectly, then passed down to children.
• Halliday - Functional Theory 


  language changes to suit the needs of its users (eg. as a landscape changes, a map has to change to reflect it)
• Hockett (1958) - Random Fluctuation Theory


  ‘language changes occur due to random errors and events’

  our language is a result of other people‘s mistakes
• Deutscher (2005) - The unfolding of language


  motives for language change:

  • save effort, take shortcuts
  • extend meaning, original meaning lost
  • aims to find order and regularity
• Theory of lexical gaps 


  new words fill in gaps in languages when some words exist in some countries but not in others
• Aitchison‘s potential, diffusion, implication, and codification model 


  Potential- internal weakness or an external pressure for change

  Diffusion - change spreads through society

  Implication - becomes a new variant

  Codification- accepted and put into the dictionary
• Humphreys 


  ‘pillaging our punctuation, savaging our sentences and raping our vocabulary’
• McArthur’s Wheel Model (1987)


  8 categories

  pros -

  • all varieties at equal distance from the centre, equal superiority
  • does not suggest it must have a particular origin
• Philipson (1992) - Linguistic Imperlism


  spread of English has accompanied the political and economic intentions of English - speaking nations to conquer other countries
• Diasphora 


  the dispersal of people and languages to different parts of the world

  2 waves:

  • 1st dispersal - English used as a native language

  • 2nd dispersal- English used as a lingua franca and adopted as a 2nd official language
• Schneider’s dynamic model of post-colonial Englishes (2007)

  1. foundation, English brought to a new territory
  2. exonormative stabilisation, bilingualism spreading
  3. nativisation, native speakers form their own form of English
  4. endonormative stabilisation, new norms accepted
  5. differentiation, varieties emerge
• Kachru’s concentric circles (1992)


  Inner circle - English used as a Native language (eg. USA)

  Outer circle - English used as a 2nd language (eg. Nigeria)

  Expanding circle - countries where an English is only used as a lingua franca (eg. China)
• Cons of Kachru’s concentric circles

  • does not address the diversity within Englishes, eg. accents
  • does not consider proficiency
  • labels suggest judgement about ‘better usage’ (inner circle have superiority because they use it most, a Chinese person may use English better than someone in the inner circle)
• Strevens (1980)


  all English varieties have either British or American standards as their root

  cons - don’t consider varieties derived from countries without connections to US or British roots (eg. Chinglish)
• Crystal - Tide metaphor 


  language is like the tide, it neither progresses or decays, it changes naturally over time
• Aitchison’s process of language change 


  Potential, diffusion, innovation, codification
• Change from above


  eg. French Academy

  Choose what words can and can’t be used and publish them into dictionary (controlled by Government)
• Change from below


  eg. teens

  New trending words are published into the dictionary due to popularity
• Political Correctness 


  aims to allow and encourage social progress
• Linguistic Determinism


  Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis -

  language controls and determines the way we think.
• criticisms of political correctness

  • censorship endangers free speech
  • marginalises words
  • enforces rarely consult minorities on their desire to change words to be PC
• Mackinnon (1996)


  suggested language can be seen as:

  • correct or incorrect
  • pleasant or ugly
  • useful to us or useless
  • socially acceptable or unacceptable
  • appropriate or inappropriate
• The Great Vowel Shift (1400s)

  a change in vowel pronunciation lead to standardisation of the English language