language change

• Johnson's English dictionary aimed to standardise English and bring it under the control of Johnson.
• The English Language is in a constant state of evolution due to factors such as geographical distances between vernaculars, cultural impacts like identities and music choices, and new invention (“technology”).
• Shakespeare was inventive with language, adding 1700 new words to the English vocabulary.
• Photobomb is a compound to plant oneself in the back of a photo, either knowingly or unwittingly.
• VCR stands for Video Cassette Recorder.
• Phablet is a blending of a phone with a large tablet-screen.
• Substratum Theory suggests that languages change when they come into contact with other languages.
• Code 35 refers to travel using Oyster cards.
• Samuel Johnson's Dictionary is an example of prescriptivism, with the idea that language should be 'fixed' and 'preserved' with set rules which language must follow.
• MacKinnon also identifies "damp spoon" syndrome, where sloppiness and laziness cause language change, such as the use of glottal stop for water, butter, and letter.
• MacKinnon also identifies the "infectious disease" idea, which suggests that language 'catches' change, like a disease.
• MacKinnon also identifies the "crumbling castle" view, which supposes a time when the language reached a peak of perfection.
• Johnson's Aim in his preface was to provide definitions that are succinct, appropriate, and consistent, with copious quotation to support each definition.
• Donald MacKinnon categorises the attitudes people may have to language use into three categories: Language use as correct or incorrect, Language use as pleasant or ugly, and Language examples as socially acceptable or unacceptable.
• The study of the origin of words and their changes in meaning throughout history is known as Etymology.
• Criticisms of Aitchinson’s metaphors include examples where language change has happened for a deliberate reason, such as the arrival of Christianity, the Viking invasion, and the Norman Conquest.
• Jean Aitchinson uses two metaphors to describe language change: Damp Spoon and Crumbling Castle.
• Semantic change can result in a "hot spot", which is a place of political danger, a lively nightclub, an area on the screen which can be clicked on to start an operation such as loading a file, or an area where you can get connected to the Internet through a wireless network.
• The origin of English words includes Native Vocabulary (the Anglo-Saxon Lexemes), which includes grammatical words (in, on, be, that), lexical words (father, love, name), and affixes (mis-, un-, -ness, -less).
• Semantic change involves four kinds of changes: Extension or generalisation, Narrowing or specialisation, Amelioration, and Pejoration.
• Foreign Borrowings are another part of the origin of English words, with over 350 languages on record as sources of English present-day vocabulary.
• Before the printing press, there were several dialects across England, meaning that there was great regional diversity between English speakers.
• Register Drift is the process where a word that is thought of as slang can eventually gain acceptance as respectable.
• Narrowing is the process where the meaning of a word becomes more specialised or specific, also known as Specialisation.
• Amelioration is the process where a word with a very severe or taboo connotations gradually becomes less negative and milder in its use.
• Political correctness (PC) is a more recent semantic change that has occurred because of political correctness, which seeks to redress some of the linguistic bias featured in language and power/ gender.
• While some degree of variation in spoken forms is incorporated into the written system, there is relatively little tolerance for such spelling variation as gonna ('going to'), wanna ('want to'), gotcha ('got you'), and jeat yet? ('did you eat yet?')
• Vowels in English can have different pronunciations depending on the surrounding sounds and stress patterns.
• Carrington et al found specific evidence that linguistic compression is used in text and social media i.e vowel deletion, phonetic spelling, initialisms and letter/ number homophones.
• Wood et al studied between 243 children’s grammatical violations made when text messaging and their performance on assessments of spoken and written grammatical understanding.
• In a follow-up study, Wood et al repeated the procedure used by Wood et al over a one-year period and again asked children to transcribe their natural messages and assessed their grammar skills on various tasks.
• Theorist 5: Wood et al did not find any significant correlations between children’s grammar scores and grammatical violations in their textese.
• Mass migration of peoples led to the development of many new words in standard English.
• The BBC decided to broadcast only using “standard English” and Received Pronunciation to help educate the nation (RP).
• The influence of the mass-media, particularly newspapers and radio, increased in the early 20th Century.
• Uptalk or Upspeak, the tendency to speak with a rising intonation (as if asking a question), even when uttering declaratives, is a speech habit especially associated with young people, and is thought to be more common among females than males.
• In the 21st Century, there was a stigma attached to certain ‘less prestigious’ accents and language was still used to judge an individual’s level of education and social prestige.
• Standard English and Received Pronunciation were taught in schools as a prestige, educated variety of English.
• American English continued to invade via media: TV, cinema, music and the Internet.
• Certain dialects and accents, especially amongst young people, increased in influence.