Language Change

By Lauren Jefferson

 

Change. We all change. Everything about us changes over time. How we look like, how we are, what we like.

 

We change how we speak. We deliberately change our language speaking to different people, e.g. our friends vs. our teachers. We even adopt words from people we admire. The language around us changes, often without us even knowing until it already happened and it is nothing anybody could predict.

 

We borrow words from other languages, through language contact. These borrowed words are so called loanwords.

 

Borrowing words has happened throughout history. Events have taken place and our language has changed. Common dates are those of invasions, such as the Norman Conquest or settlements such as the Scandinavian Settlement. Trade also encouraged language change. Moreover, part of the colonization and with the growing British Empire, English was adapted to new culture's communicational demands.

 

Cultural developments are and have been a reason why we see changes in the English language. Via trade, new ideas and objects appeared, but people of one language had no word for it. So they adopted the foreign word. Anglo-Saxon words for example, weren't able to keep up with ideas brought in by the French. There wasn't an alternative other than to adopt foreign words. The new ones often replaced the old. Or they stayed, though with a different meaning than before.

 

Power and social prestige have also effect the process of borrowing. The languages can have a super/substral relation, an uneven level of power/prestige. Germanic tribes for example, adopted many Latin words from trading with Romans, but Romans hardly adopted any Germanic words. Also, the relation between the Spanish and some Native American languages had a super/substral relation, with the Spanish language being superstratal and the Native American languages being subtratal.

 

Social factors have been a motivation for people to change their language.

Language shifts, as language changes between a small group of people and the majority. This is where a group of speakers change from speaking a lower prestige language to speaking a higher prestige language. An example is during Henry II's reign, where Englishmen saw it a social advantage to learn French.

 

Some general information to language change would be the fact that for many years, about 350, Latin was the language for official records. French slowly took over in England as a prestige language in literacy, and then as the language of law. French loanwords were borrowed for specific fields, such as in military language and ranks. Latin words quickly entered the English language due to people's horizon and mind, mainly men's at the time (middle ages), expanding.

 

Other examples for loanwords are 'anchor' from the Germanic ancor, 'martyr' from the Latin martir and 'badger' from the Celtic brocc.

 

Today, borrowing is motivated by geographical distance, by economic and cultural factors. Languages will differ or equally meet in the middle through globalisation. It seems language would only stop changing, if society would stop moving.

 

References:

 

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words04/structure/borrowed.html

Suzanne Kemmer, Associate Professor of Linguistics at Rice University

 

http://www.unc.edu/~gerfen/Ling30Sp2002/language_contact.html

Chip Gerfen, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Advisor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

 

'How language works' by David Crystal; penguin edition published 2006

 

'The Story of English in 100 Words' by David Crystal; paperback edition: published 2012