Exploring Language Change

Mari Jones, Ishtla Singh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136522406
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

In this student-friendly text, Jones and Singh explore the phenomenon of language change, with a particular focus on the social contexts of its occurrence and possible motivations, including speakers' intentions and attitudes.

Presenting new or little-known data, the authors draw a distinction between "unconscious" and "deliberate" change. The discussion on "unconscious" change considers phenomena such as the emergence and obsolescence of individual languages, whilst the sections on "deliberate" change focus on issues of language planning, including the strategies of language revival and revitalization movements. There is also a detailed exploration of what is arguably the most extreme instance of "deliberate" change; language invention for real-world use.

Examining an extensive range of language situations, Exploring Language Change makes a clear, but often ignored distinction between concepts such as language policy and planning, and language revival and revitalization. Also featured are a number of case studies which demonstrate that real-life language use is often much more complex than theoretical abstractions might suggest.

This is a key text for students on a variety of courses, including sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and language policy and planning.

1 Internally motivated change

1.1 Introduction

In 1712, Jonathan Swift stated in his Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue that language change, which he associated specifically with ‘linguistic corruption’ and generally with social decline, was a process that should be kept in check: ‘I see no absolute Necessity’, he stated, ‘why any Language would be perpetually changing’ (1712: 15). Swift's comments were made with the standardisation of English in mind, but his antipathy to change and its alleged negative linguistic and social dimension is one which often found popular expression (see, for instance, Milroy and Milroy's (1999) discussion of the ‘culture of complaint’ in relation to English) and which was also perpetuated, until relatively recently, in scholarly perspectives. Indeed, with respect to the latter, it is perhaps fair to say that in principle, theories and understanding of change have undergone as much transformation as the data linguists have sought to describe, as ideologies and perspectives have themselves shifted. We will not attempt here to trace an entire history of linguistic thought in this area but the following brief and selective discussion should serve to illustrate our point.

In the European linguistic tradition, observation of change effectively began in the late eighteenth century, when work into reconstructing language families (or genetic linguistics) was underway. Initial discussions of change, however, were necessarily limited in this early period, comprising either unsystematic and fragmentary catalogues of changes in the languages being researched, or ‘the rather directionless pursuit of individual forms down the branches of the family tree’ (McMahon 1994: 18). Language itself was often metaphorised as a biological organism – an entity that underwent birth, maturity, decay and death (see, for instance, Schleicher 1863 (in Koerner 1983)); and change was typically (and negatively) viewed as the mechanism that effected loss of linguistic ‘vitality’ and signalled decline. A heavily inflected language such as classical Latin, for example, was considered to be at the height of its ‘maturity’, or in its Golden Age (a perspective due more to the reverence with which classical civilisation was viewed in many parts of eighteenth-century Europe than to any innate linguistic quality) whereas its Romance descendants such as French and Italian (with comparatively reduced inflectional systems) were seen as poorer and degraded relations which had ‘lost’ valuable linguistic material.

Early explanations of change were also rooted not in direct observations of languages and their speakers, but instead in ideas of divine intervention and human acclimatisation: the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, for example, was often cited as a motivating factor for change, as were the supposed effects of ‘climate, diet or race on language … for instance, frication of stops might result from speakers moving into mountainous regions, where the thin air made it harder to catch one's breath and the exertion of running up and down mountains promoted heavy breathing’ (Meyer 1901; cited in McMahon 1994: 18).

By the late nineteenth century, however, perspectives on linguistic change had themselves undergone transformation. The Zeitgeist had embraced science as a legitimate pursuit and, concomitantly, the notion that all aspects of existence were underpinned by the operation of logic and the maintenance of order. Unsurprisingly, this approach was adopted by the dominant contemporary school of historical linguistic research – the Neogrammarian¹– through which change began to be studied in a more structured, scientific way and, importantly, with primary explanatory emphasis on language itself, instead of on alleged external causal factors such as geographical region.

Such principles have remained important in studies of change, albeit sometimes undergoing a measure of modification. Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 1), for instance, point out that for over a century, mainstream historical linguistics has continued to differentiate between change that occurs because of ‘innate’ factors (internal or internally motivated), and that which is due to catalysts such as contact (external or externally motivated) – a distinction that has become largely accepted and used in the literature (although see discussion of Mufwene (2001) below). However, the measure of importance accorded to each has shifted somewhat: traditionally, historical linguistics concentrated solely on determining the motivations for and mechanisms of internal change, which was considered the more ‘normal’ and, indeed, primary of the two. Thus, historical linguistic techniques developed in the nineteenth century such as comparative reconstruction (which, in essence, uses available data to work backwards to unrecorded linguistic ancestors) were initially based on an assumption that ‘virtually all language change arises through intrasystemic causes’ (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 1). Similarly, later twentieth-century schools of linguistics such as the Generative (see Section 1.5) based theories of diachronic change on assumptions of ‘normal transmission’; that is, intergenerational transmission unaffected by external factors. As we will see, the Generative school also focused explanations of change on shifts within speakers’ innate grammars or language systems.

By default, external factors such as contact have therefore often been viewed as relatively unimportant: witness Welmers' view that external influences ‘are insignificant when compared with internal change … the established principles of comparative and historical linguistics, and all we know about language history and language change, demand that … we seek explanations first on the basis of recognised processes of language change’ (1970: 4–5; in Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 1).² However, from at least the second half of the twentieth century (cf. Weinreich 1953; see also Chapter 2), acknowledgement has gradually been made of the fact that a language's ‘external life’ – its social contexts of use and shifts in its communities of speakers for example – plays a significant and ‘normal’ role in the changes it undergoes. Consideration of external motivations has therefore been increasingly incorporated into modern historical linguistic and sociolinguistic accounts of change.

As a final, and recent, example of how perspectives on studying and accounting for change have shifted, we will briefly look at some of the ideas in Mufwene's current work in language ecology, which in part argues against the traditional distinction between internally and externally motivated change (the following discussion is simplified for explanatory purposes). Mufwene (2001) argues that the early trope of language-as-organism still pervades discussions of change, and its use tends to obscure certain ‘realities’ about both the nature of language itself and the actuating factors that underlie linguistic change. For instance, it is arguable that the language-as-organism metaphor encourages us to envisage (and therefore represent) language as a holistic entity that all members of a speech community share and make use of in exactly the same way. However, we know from relevant studies that this is not accurate: ‘variation in the production of sounds, in the expression of concepts, in the encoding of meanings etc.’ (Mufwene 2001: 148) is actually a constant in any given speech community. The notion of a shared ‘communal language’ is therefore a convenient abstraction, an assumption of ‘a collective mind that is an ensemble of individual minds in a population’ (Mufwene 2001: 2). However, each ‘individual mind’ possesses, in Chomsky's (1986) terms, an I-language (internalised language) or idiolect, which is that speaker's particular system of a language. Idiolects in a speech community are not identical, but they typically share enough properties to allow for successful communication. A language is therefore ‘an aggregating construct, an extrapolation from individual idiolects assumed to share a common ancestry and several structural features’ (Mufwene 2001: 150) or, to use another biological metaphor, a species: ‘like a biological species defined by the potential of its members to interbreed and procreate offspring of the same kind, a language can be defined as “a population of idiolects that enable their hosts to communicate with and understand one another”’ (Robert Perlman, personal communication to Mufwene, 1999; quoted in Mufwene 2001: 150).

In this perspective, change occurs because of inter-idiolectal contact among speakers. This creates a mental ‘feature pool’ in which variants compete and from which speakers select, thus becoming ‘the default causation for change’ (Mufwene 2001: 15), an idea that arguably brings us closer to ‘the real actuation question’, namely ‘why certain instances of variation become changes while others don't’ (McMahon 1994: 248).³ Thus, for Mufwene, the traditional distinction between internally and externally motivated change is one which really only has social salience, since all change is ultimately motivated by speaker contact.

A distinction between internal and external motivations has, however, continued to be observed in discussions of, and debates about, the nature of linguistic change; and we will attempt to illustrate both in this and the following chapter. We begin with examples and explanations of internally motivated change.

1.2 Locating internally motivated change

It is arguable that the use of the term motivated in explanations of change appears to assume that it is possible to access the initial reasons why a change might begin. Given, however, that language ultimately exists in the mind of the speaker, who is mostly unaware of his or her innate linguistic knowledge, this is highly unlikely if not downright impossible. In cases of change designated as externally motivated, the phrase has a measure of aptness in that it is possible to pinpoint contributory contextual factors such as contact (although again, we do not know exactly how social factors translate onto the innate linguistic landscape), but in those where no correlation to external events has been or can be made, the linguist can only hope to discern tendencies or patterns of change once they are under way. Explanations of internally motivated change therefore, necessarily tend to describe and theorise processes of change or the mechanisms by which change can occur, and to hypothesise about their possible motivations. As we will see later in this chapter, such actuation hypotheses, although useful, ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• 1 Internally motivated change
• 2 Externally motivated change
• 3 Language birth
• 4 Language death
• 5 Language planning and revitalisation
• 6 Language revival
• 7 Language invention
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Useful web sites
• General index
• Index of people