LANGUAGE CHANGE

A.    Background

Language is always changing. We've seen that language changes across space and across social group. Language also varies across time.

Generation by generation, pronunciations evolve, new words are borrowed or invented, the meaning of old words drifts, and morphology develops or decays. The rate of change varies, but whether the changes are faster or slower, they build up until the "mother tongue" becomes arbitrarily distant and different. After a thousand years, the original and new languages will not be mutually intelligible. After ten thousand years, the relationship will be essentially indistinguishable from chance relationships between historically unrelated languages.

In isolated subpopulations speaking the same language, most changes will not be shared. As a result, such subgroups will drift apart linguistically, and eventually will not be able to understand one another.

In the modern world, language change is often socially problematic. Long before divergent dialects lose mutual intelligibility completely, they begin to show difficulties and inefficiencies in communication, especially under noisy or stressful conditions. Also, as people observe language change, they usually react negatively, feeling that the language has "gone down hill". You never seem to hear older people commenting that the language of their children or grandchildren's generation has improved compared to the language of their own youth.

B.     LANGUAGE CHANGE

Language change is a phenomenon studied both by historical linguists and sociolinguists. Language change is the change of phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of language vary over time.

Historical linguists study basically the change of language over time (diacronic change) and examine how languages were used in the past and how they relate to one onother.

E.g. Old English  à   Middle English   à   Modern English

Historical change composed of internal change, external change or borrowing, and etymology.Internal change is caused by the addition and loss of sounds and lexical items, invents of new words and extensions. External change is mainly caused by the adoption of borrowing. Etymology tells us where a word came from (often, but not always, from another language) and what it used to mean.

C.    Levels of the language change :

a.       Sound change

b.      Grammatical change

c.       Lexical change

d.      Semantic change

1.      Sound Change

Traditionally historical linguistic studies begin with sound change which is a term to describe the passage of historical transition from a given phoneme or group of phonemes to another, e.g. the change of Germanic [sk] into Old English [sh].

a. Phonetic change: affects the manner of articulation.

Old English :               Modern English :

•         hu:s                  haws                (‘house’)

•         wi:f                  wayf                (‘wife’)

•         spo:n                spu:n                (‘spoon’)

•         brɛ:k               bre:k                (‘break’)

•         hO:m               hom                 (‘home’)

b. Phonemic change: affects the pronunciation or sound system structures.
Eg. /з:/ (as in “meat” or “read”) or /e:/ (as in “meet” or “reed”).

There are various theories that justify the causes of sound change. The first is that sound change is brought about by anatomical changes within the population. Other assign sound change to social and historical reasons and discover a link between political instability and linguistic instability. Other theories that discuss the causes of sound change are substratum theory,ease theory and imitation theory.

Linguists have divided sound change into three categories:

1. Unconditioned ( Generic) changes

2. Conditioned ( Combinatory) changes, and

3. Sporadic ( Miscellaneous) changes.

v  Unconditioned change

A generic or unconditioned change is a change that affects every occurrence of a certain sound, no matter whereabout in the words it occurs. For example, Old English /a:/ changes everywhere to Middle English /o:/ and to Modern English /ou/.

Word	Old English	Middle English	Modern English
Ham	Ham  /ha:m/	Hoom /ho:m/	Home /houm/

The word ham /ha:m/, for example, became hoom /ho:m/ in Middle English, and home /houm/ in Modern English.  But unconditioned or generic changes are rare.

v  Conditioned change

Conditioned or combinatory changes are changes which occur only under a fixed set of conditions.  "Allophones of phoneme", says Lehmann, "are generally restricted to certain environments: here they are conditioned by their surrounding. When such allophones undergo a change , we speak of a conditioned or combinatory change."  For example, ME /u/ to NE /u/ after labials.  PGmc /f, O, s/ to /v, d, g/ when not preceded by the chief stress.

v  Sporadic change

It is not easy to draw the line between conditioned change and sporadic change since the two merge into one another.  So we treat the word "sporadic" very loosely to mean a change of phoneme that does not occur elsewhere and also to include morphophonemic changes.

2.      Grammatical Change

Grammatical change is the change in grammar and vocabulary.  By grammatical change, the members of a grammatical set are increased or reduced in number, and the means involved in marking grammatical categories are extended. Grammatical change occurs in :

a.      Morphological change: languages as analogy.
Eg. Middle English plural from ”cow”  was “kine “; Modern English: cow/cows; bull/bulls.

Analogy is a process by which morphs, combination of morphs or linguistic patterns are modified, or new ones created in accordance with those present in a language. Types of Analogy :

      Pure Grammatical

e.g. English eye > eyes after plural - s. English can > could in the past tense on the basis of will - would, shall - should.

      Semantic

e.g. male, femel > male, female

English borrowed the French word 'male' and 'femelle' - but owing to their semantic link 'femelle' became 'female' under the influence of male.

      Back formation

e.g. ‘beg’ from 'beggar'

         after pairs such as sing, singer.

b.Syntactic change

Lexical words increasingly adopt a grammatical function.
  Eg. “Will” meant “want”.

3.      Lexical Change

Indeed, there is no distinct dividing line between grammatical change and lexical change. Many a time the two intersect.  The vocabulary of a language is more strictly called the 'lexis' of a language, and it is lexical items which are examined.  For convenience, lexical change can be divided into three categories:

1. Loss of lexical items

  2. Change of meaning, and

  3. Creation of new lexical items.

      Loss of Lexical Items

            Loss of lexical items due to internal and external factors, words undergo a change.  'Homonymic clash', 'phonetic alteration' and the need to shorten common words are common internal causes.  Homonyms are words which have the same phonemic structure but different meanings as 'bank'.  The existence of homonyms need not lead to word loss.

It only does so if the homonyms crop up in the same context and cause confusion as in the homonymic class between English 'leten' (to permit) and latten(to hinder).  It is out of those homonyms that the English word 'led' was developed.

Phonetic attrition is not common.  Sometimes a word becomes so altered by sound change that it almost disappears.

 A well known example is the Latin word 'apem' which was replaced by longer words such as 'abeille'.

The need to shorten common words is a type of attrition, a linguistic phenomenon known as Zipf's law.  Zipf showed that common words tend to be shorter than uncommon ones. 

For examples :   'refrigerator' became 'fridge',

   'television' became 'tele' or 'TV,

   'aeroplane' became 'plane'.

      Change of Meaning

It is studied in semantic change.  There are so many causes 'linguistic', 'historical', 'environmental', 'psychological', etc., that bring change in meaning. 

For example the word 'persona', which in the beginning of Roman drama meant 'mask', then 'a character indicated by a mask', thereupon a character or a 'role in a play'.

      Creation of New Lexical Items

It is caused by external borrowing and internal borrowing. English has borrowed from French the words like 'crown', 'power','state', etc., from Arabic the words like 'zero', 'zenith', 'alchemy', etc.These are the examples of external borrowings. Internal borrowings frequently start out as slang, which later becomes accepted as 'snob', 'squabble', 'hard up'. 

'Bird', now becoming acceptable in meaning of 'girl', is perhaps borrowed from the word 'bride'.

4.      Semantic Change

Diachronic semantics studies semantic change, whereas synchronic semantics  accounts for semantic relationship, simple or multiple.  According to referential theory given by Ullman in his book, "Principles", "a semantic change will occur whenever a new name becomes attached to a sense, or a new sense to a new name."

Semantic change is caused by 'linguistic, historical, environmental, psychological causes'. It is caused by 'foreign influences and the need for a new name'.

Types of Semantic Change

There is a considerable disagreement among scholars on the classification and terminology of semantic change.  According to Meillet, there are three types of semantic change:

1. Changes due to linguistic reasons

e.g. 'contagion': the negative use of 'pas, personne, point, reing, Jomais', owing to purely syntagmetic conditions.

2. Changes due to historical reasons

e.g. the 'thing-meant' becomes modified in the course of culture development, whereas the name remains unaltered: 'plume'/. feather. pen:

  3.Changes due to social stratification: Latin 'ponere', trahere', 'cubrare', 'mutare', employed in a specialized social group, the word of farming, acquire a more restricted sense in 'pondre', 'traire', 'couver', 'muer', 'ad-ripare', borrowed by the common standard from nautical terminology, receives the widened sense of French 'arriver'.

REFERENCES

Aitchson, Jean, 1991. Language Change: Progress or Decay? 2nd Ed. CUP.

Chambers, J.K., Peter Trudgill and Estesz. 2006. The Hanbook of Language Variation and Change. Blackwell Publishing.

Good, Jeff. 2008. Linguistic Universals and Language Change. OUP.

Holmes, Janet. 2001. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Pearson Education Ltd.

Yule, George. 2006. The Study of Language. CUP.

Language Variation and Change, 1 (1989). Cambridge University.