Sociolinguistic
Language
change
Language
change, or the evolution of language, is the phenomenon whereby
phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of
language vary over time. The effect on language over time is known as
diachronic change. Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern
themselves with studying language change: historical linguistics and
sociolinguistics. Historical linguists examine how people in the past
used language and seek to determine how subsequent languages derive
from previous ones and relate to one another. Sociolinguists study
the origins of language changes and want to explain how society and
changes in society influence language.
- Economy
Speakers tend to make their utterances as
efficient and effective as possible to reach communicative goals.
Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs and
benefits.
The
principle of least effort:
Speakers especially use economy in their articulation, which tends
to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms. See vowel
reduction,
cluster reduction,
lenition,
and elision.
After some time a change may become widely accepted (it becomes a
regular sound change)
and may end up treated as a standard. For instance: going to
[ˈɡoʊ.ɪntʊ] → gonna [ˈɡʌnə], with examples of both vowel
reduction [ʊ] → [ə] and elision [nt] → [n], [oʊ.ɪ] → [ʌ].
- Analogy
Reducing
word forms by likening different forms of the word to the root.
- Language contact
He borrowing of words
from foreign languages.
- The medium of communication
- Cultural environment
Groups of speakers will
reflect new places, situations, and objects in their language,
whether they encounter different people there or not.
Types of language change
Lexical changes
The study of lexical
changes forms the diachronic portion of the science of onomasiology.
The ongoing influx of new
words in the English language (for example) helps make it a rich
field for investigation into language change, despite the difficulty
of defining precisely and accurately the vocabulary available to
speakers of English. Throughout its history English has not only
borrowed words from other languages but has re-combined and recycled
them to create new meanings, whilst losing some old words.
Phonetic and phonological changes
The concept of sound
change covers both phonetic and phonological developments.
The sociolinguist William
Labov recorded the change in pronunciation in a relatively short
period in the American resort of Martha’s Vineyard and showed how
this resulted from social tensions and processes. Even in the
relatively short time that broadcast media have recorded their work,
one can observe the difference between the pronunciation of the
newsreaders of the 1940s and the 1950s and the pronunciation of
today. The greater acceptance and fashionability of regional accents
in media may also reflect a more democratic, less formal society —
compare the widespread adoption of language policies.
The mapping and recording
of small-scale phonological changes poses difficulties, especially as
the practical technology of sound recording dates only from the 19th
century. Written texts provide the main (indirect) evidence of how
language sounds have changed over the centuries . But note Ferdinand
de Saussure's work on postulating the existence and disappearance of
laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European as an example of other methods of
detecting/reconstructing sound-changes within historical linguistics.
Spelling changes
Standardisation of
spelling originated relatively recently.[citation needed] Differences
in spelling often catch the eye of a reader of a text from a previous
century. The pre-print era had fewer literate people: languages
lacked fixed systems of orthography, and the handwritten manuscripts
that survive often show words spelled according to regional
pronunciation and to personal preference.
Semantic changes
Semantic changes include ;
- Pejoration, in which a term acquires a negative association
- Amelioration, in which a term acquires a positive association
- Widening, in which a term acquires a broader meaning
- Narrowing, in which a term acquires a narrower meaning
