Languages & Linguistics
Language Changes
Language changes refer to the natural evolution of languages over time, including shifts in vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and usage. These changes can be influenced by various factors such as cultural shifts, technological advancements, and contact with other languages. Linguists study language changes to understand the mechanisms behind linguistic evolution and to track the development of different language varieties.
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10 Key excerpts on "Language Changes"
eBook - PDF- Peter Sharpe(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
Why Do Languages Change? Introduction Despite the universal constraints that our kind of consciousness places upon language, enormous differences exist between the world’s six thousand odd languages. Some linguists play down these differences by describing them as variations on a single theme – human. Others think they stem, not from one source, but from the diversity that cultures exhibit. But all agree on one thing: languages do change over time. The study of language change belongs to the field of historical linguistics , sometimes called diachronic linguistics . The techni-cal term diachronic refers to the study of the processes of language change over time. Historical linguistics has three broad areas of enquiry. The first is the study of the history of particular languages on the basis of existing written data. Comparative philology used to do this, until it was gradually incorporated into the more scien-tific approach of historical linguistics from about two hundred years ago. The second area of enquiry is the study of the prehistory of language when there was no written evidence. The third area is the study of changes that are happening now. The latter approach is termed synchronic . Basically, synchronic studies look at the state of a language at a particular point or period of time, while diachronic studies consider the processes of change over time. In this chapter, we shall focus on changes that stem from the passage of time. We shall begin by showing the scale of these changes and explaining some of the underlying processes. Then, we shall turn our attention to evolutionary explanations for lan-guage change and ask how Darwinian they really are. Lastly, we shall consider one large-scale change that radically altered English to the way we know it today. Why Do Languages Change? 53 The Scale of the Changes Over large periods of time languages undergo so many changes that they become unrecognizable.
eBook - PDF- Shannon Bischoff, Carmen Jany, Shannon Bischoff, Carmen Jany(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The position advocated by Christiansen and Chater (2008), among others, suggests that understanding how languages are shaped, and how they work, requires attending to events and changes that have occurred over multiple tim‑ escales. These include long‑term changes, such as those that have occurred over the course of the evolution of the human species, and linguistic changes of the sort that historical linguists have detailed as occurring over the course of decades and centuries (e.g., Labov, 1994; 2001). These events also include relatively short‑ term changes, such as the behaviors that develop as we use language across the lifespan and the comparatively minor adjustments to the comprehension and production of language that occur every time we have a conversation (e.g., Clark, 1996; Giles, Coupland & Coupland, 1991). Rather than assuming that linguistic knowledge crystalizes at some point early in one’s life and that the structures of a language are unchanging within the individual, this perspective highlights the malleability of linguistic behavior. The linguistic behavior of individual people and the patterns of usage within a language community are in a constant state of flux. Some of these changes may reflect temporary adaptations to a given circum‑ stance (e.g., adjusting one’s perceptual representations to accommodate an unfa‑ miliar accent; Sumner & Samuel, 2009). However, under the right circumstances, local changes that occur when speakers make contact with each other can spread through a linguistic community and produce language change on a broader scale (e.g., Labov, 2001). Understanding why languages are structured the way that they are, then, requires considering not only the kinds of changes in linguistic behavior that occur over broad stretches of time (years, decades, centuries), but also the way that local adaptations of linguistic behavior contribute to these broader changes.
eBook - PDF- Matthew J. Gordon(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
CHAPTER SEVEN Labov as historical linguist In the most general sense, historical linguistics describes that branch of the field dedicated to the study of language change. Questions of how and why languages evolve over time have been central to linguistics from the start. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some of the most significant achievements in the field came from the study of historical connections within the Indo-European family of languages. Scholars traced the history of English, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and the roughly 200 other languages that make up this family. By systematically comparing the daughter languages, they succeeded in reconstructing a detailed picture of the structure of the common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European, a language thought to have been spoken some 6,000–9,000 years ago. Interest in language change has dominated Labov’s research agenda, though he has set his sights on more recent developments. Still, he has wrestled with many of the same issues as traditional historical linguistics throughout his career from the landmark studies he carried out in graduate school to his opus magnum on the subject, the three-volume Principles of Linguistic Change (1994, 2001b, 2010). This diachronic emphasis comes as little surprise. After all, language variation and language change go hand-in-hand. Change is essentially variation projected in the temporal dimension. Just as synchronic variation involves one group preferring usage A to usage B while a different group prefers B to A, language change appears as people at one time preferring A to B, and people at some later time preferring B to A. Moreover, the same methodology LABOV 162 developed for studying sociolinguistic variation at one point in time shines new light on the study of language change. This chapter sketches Labov’s methodological innovations in the exploration of linguistic change and highlights key insights resulting from this work.
eBook - PDF- Hans Henrich Hock(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
This suggests that response changes can be sensitive to primary changes which are still in progress and that, therefore, sound change is observable, contrary to neogrammarian doctrine. Finally, while goal-oriented shifts commonly are regular, the compo-nent changes which implement the shift may apply in an irregular fashion. In fact, these component changes may sometimes consist of inherently irregular processes such as borrowing and analogy. (Compare for instance section 8.3 above.) 638 20. Linguistic change: Nature and causes 20.5. The linguistic unpredictability of change Even to the extent that the functionalist approach seems to provide an explanation of the motivations or causes of wholesale shifts, that explanation to a significant degree is only an apparent one. And similarly, notions such as 'assimilation' and 'weakening' provide only apparent causes for change. In fact, the case is the same for the putative motivations of non-regular change, such as the psychological association of forms which constitutes the basis for analogy. In all of these cases, the apparent explanation does not provide a cause or motivation which is sufficiently explicit and compelling to predict a specific outcome. Rather, we are merely dealing with a label, delineating one of many possible and natural changes, with many possible and natural sub-varieties. Which of these a given language may 'choose' at a given time, is a question which these 'explanations' are unable to answer. To take the case of chain shifts first: While it is true that the starting point for the Swedish chain shift, the fronting of u, is a very common phenomenon, the phonetic nature of that fronting may differ from language to language. Some languages show fronted and rounded outcomes (cf. Fr. it), while others have unrounded vowels which more-over may be fronted merely to central position (cf. dialectal American Engl, [iw] in words like boot).
eBook - PDF- Praful Dhondopant Kulkarni(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Society Publishing(Publisher)
Language Data There are many different ways of investigating language change, for example considering changes to lexicon, morphology, phonology, or syntax (Bowern and Evans, 2014). Here we consider one particular form of language evolution, the gain, and loss of word variants from basic vocabulary, as it allows us to make comparable measures of rate of language change across different languages (Bromham et al., 2015a). Basic vocabulary consists of a common set of concepts found in all languages, such as “hand,” “mother,” or “water,” for which the common word forms have been recorded in different languages—sometimes referred to as a Swadesh list (Swadesh, 1955). We used published databases of the different words (lexemes) used for a defined set of basic concepts (semantic categories). Using curated databases ensures that word forms are recorded in a comparable format for the different languages within a family. Each of the databases identifies cognate sets: forms which exhibit some systematic degree of similarity and are identified as derived from a common ancestor (Durie and Ross, 1996; Bowern and Evans, 2014). For example, the semantic category “tree” is represented by different words in different Indo-European languages. In some languages, the words for “tree or wood” reflect the same homologous Historical Linguistics and Language Change 344 cognate class derived from the common proto-Indo-European * deru-o - (Derksen, 2008), including (Greek), (Russian), and English tree (via Old English, trēow ). In contrast, the Italic languages have adopted a new lexeme reflected in forms like Latin arbor , French arbre , Italian albero and Spanish á rbol . Homologous forms are not just look-alikes but are identified using the linguistic comparative method to determine systematic sound correspondences and phonological innovations (Paul, 1880; Bloomfield, 1933; Durie and Ross, 1996; Bowern and Evans, 2014).
eBook - PDF- Edgar C. Polomé(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The context of language change Joseph Salmons 0. Introduction This chapter reviews research on four points of intersection between language change and sociolinguistics: 1 1) the sociolinguistic variable 2) social factors in language change 3) language contact change 4) areal aspects of language change. Historical linguists have increasingly utilized sociolinguistic insights to understand language change. 2 Even linguists long and intimately identified with mechanistic theories of language change now acknowl-edge that social factors play a crucial role in language change. P. Kiparsky, a key figure in transformational-generative (TG) historical linguistics, wrote (1980: 415): Language acquisition and language use cannot be idealized away from the theory of change as they can from formal grammar, nor smuggled in disguised as structure, as has happened in generative work. The theories of grammar, language acquisition, and language use have to be considered as interacting subsystems in the explanation of change. R. D. King, another central TG historical linguist into the early 1970s, has recently written (1980: 414, cf. also King 1973) that a linguist who rigidly separates the internal and external aspects of language history inevitably pays the ultimate price for his linguistic 'purity': what he says is a shallow imitation of linguistic reality. In short, it is widely agreed at present that social context and language change are inextricably connected. 72 Joseph Salmons 1. Sociolinguistic variation The modern study of language change in progress, pioneered by Labov and others, rests on the study of sociolinguistic variation. 3 What is a sociolinguistic variable? Sankoff (1972: 58; 1980) defines it broadly: Whenever there are options open to a speaker, we can infer from his or her behavior an underlying set of probabilities. This notion is so broad as to cover variation which carries no social or stylistic meaning.
eBook - PDFLinguistic Dynamics
Discourses, Procedures and Evolution
- Thomas T. Ballmer(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
RUDI KELLER Towards a Theory of Linguistic Change* In this paper it is shown to what extent prevailing views about the nature of language have hindered the development of a theory of linguistic change. I attempt to show 1. that so-called natural languages are neither natural nor artificial but rather Phenomena of the Third Kind, 2. that for that reason neither causal nor intentional explanations can be appropriate but, instead, invisible-hand explanations, 3. that the individual competence of each one of us is his hypothesis of communicating successfully with others, and 4. that this hypothesis must be modified continuously through success and failure as well as on the basis of some maxims of communication. 1. Does Language Change, or do rve Change Language? As far as a theory of linguistic change is concerned, there is a remarkable gap in scientific research. Although linguists nowadays are more likely to be accused of being overburdened by theory, Coseriu, towards the end of his book Sincronia, diacronia e historia, makes the lapidary and apparently still valid statement that No one knows exactly how languages change 1 ; and this after a century in which linguists had, in essence, devoted themselves to problems which revolved around this question. This theoretical deficit, which still exists today, has to do with the questions linguists have asked and with those they have not asked; our questions fix the limits of our answers 2 , and the limits of our questions are fixed by the conception of language they are implicitly or explicitly based on. The answers to the question as to what sort of a thing language is, have not been unanimous within the past century and a half, but most have agreed that language is a thing. Hermann Paul's * This paper represents a distillation of a longer manuscript, still in preparation, which I hope to publish in book form. In it I hope to be able to elaborate upon some of the ideas presented here in inappropriately brief form.
eBook - PDF- Tadeusz Milewski, M. Brochwicz(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
In these and many other cases the same word referred successively to various objects which in the course of centuries replaced one another in fulfilling the same function within society. Changes of this type are 12. THE CAUSES OF LINGUISTIC CHANGE 147 rather frequent; the most numerous semantic shifts, however, are caused by the passing of words from the language of one social sphere to that of another. National languages, like Polish or French, include elements of two different types, i.e., each of them includes a general language used by everyone, plus special lan-guages—jargons of particular professions and social groups. The general language and social languages share a common phonological and syntactic system; they differ from one another primarily in vocabulary. Thus, one of the most important causes of meaning changes in words is the fact that they are constantly being borrowed from special languages by the general language and vice versa. This leads to important consequences. When words pass from general language into jargon, their meaning becomes narrower and more precise, while it becomes more general when words pass from jargon into general language, with the accom-panying impoverishment of the meaning content. The cause of this phenomenon is not difficult to determine. Jargons functioning within fairly rare and precisely defined situations limit the meaning of words to these narrow possibilities; general language, on the other hand, used in much more variagated situations, broadens the meaning of words. Here are a few examples. The meaning of the Latin words ponere (to put), cubare (to lay), trahere (to pull) and mutare (to change) underwent great contraction in the language of French peasants in the early Middle Ages as a result of their being limited to situations connected with agriculture and livestock raising.
eBook - PDFLanguage
Its Structure and Use
- Edward Finegan, , , (Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 452 Chapter 12 Language Change Over Time: Historical Linguistics At no other time in history have there been such intensive contacts between language communities as in recent centuries. As a result of the exploratory and colonizing enterprises of the Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, European languages have come into contact with languages of Africa, Native will be shown to be related to one another, as some researchers are attempting to do with Nostratic, but those connections lie at such a chronological distance that we can’t trace the relationships with confidence, at least not yet. Consider a few historical facts as background to today’s explosive interest in language evolution. As we noted earlier in this chapter, as early as 1786 William Jones recognized that certain languages bore so strong an “affinity” to one another in verbs and grammar that, as he put it, they must have “sprung from some com-mon source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” That source we now call Proto-Indo-European. Jones’s insight led to many hypotheses about the origins of language and they in turn were fueled by publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. So speculative were these hypotheses that in 1866 the influential Linguistic Society of Paris banned the presentation of papers on the subject of language origins.
eBook - PDF- Brian Joseph, Richard Janda, Brian Joseph, Richard Janda(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
For one thing, the above-mentioned examples of rapidly trending but not lasting directions of variation present linguists with On Language, Change, and Language Change 61 a crucial caveat to remember in their diachronic studies. Namely, some varia-tion is stable (occasionally for surprisingly long periods of time – a point that we stress below in section 1.2.3.8, in connection with the age-grading example of a youngster’s Mommy yielding to an adolescent’s Mom , and see nichols’s chapter 5 regarding other kinds of stability in language over time), so that variants which one encounters for the first time – and thus takes to be inno-vatory harbingers of future developments – may well be neither recent in origin nor likely to win out in the future. We emphasize this point because of our own experience as speakers of English. After living for an appreciable period of time (into our twenties) without any feeling that much linguistic change was occurring (recall Bynon’s 1977: 1, 6 previously quoted suggestion that most speakers are unaware of real changes in language precisely because they are so preoccupied with the social significance of alternative forms that they overlook their correlation with time), we later (especially in our thirties, and increasingly in our forties) became convinced that many diverse trends had just started and were surely proceeding rapidly toward their endpoint, maybe even to be completed during our lifetimes. Yet caution directs us to concede that perhaps very little of the variation which is currently known will survive for very long (even if it outlives us), much less undergo strengthening and expansion across most or all varieties of our native language.
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