Language Change

1. Definition of Change Language

The sociolinguist Jennifer Coates, following William Labov, describes linguistic change as occurring in the context of linguistic heterogeneity. She explains that “linguistic change can be said to have taken place when a new linguistic form, used by some sub-group within a speech community, is adopted by other members of that community and accepted as the norm.

2. Type of Language Change

2.1 Lexical Change

Lexical is of relating towards, word formatives, or the vocabulary of a language as distinguished from it’s grammar and construction.

Lexical change can divided :

·         Borrowing

Borrowing is another way of adding new vocabulary item to a language. Speaker of a language often have contact with speaker of other language.

Examples :

North American English shows a wide contact with other language in its borrowing

French   – leavee , prairee .

Spanish  – mesa, Patio.

German – fat cake, smear case.

Dutch     – coleslaw, cook, stoop.

·         Acronyms

Acronyms are made up of initials of words, combine into a pronounceable word.

Examples :

NATO    ( North Atlantic Treaty Organization )

UFO       ( Unidentified Flying  Object )

NASA     ( National Aeronautics and Space  Administration )

·         Blends

Blends are made up of larger parts (sometimes whole parts) of words, usually initial syllable of other word, sometimes the first part of one word and the last part of another, combined into a pronounceable word.

 examples :

Ø  Shamnesty : blend of sham and amnesty, meaning a fake amnesty, or something that pretends to be something other than an amnesty, as in the recent debate over immigration reform.

Ø  Infoganda  : A blend of information + propoganda 

  

2.2 Semantic Change

Semantic is the study of the meaning and reference. Once words-come into the language no matter what their origin, there are subject not only to the rules of pronunciation of that language but also to semantic change, there are changes in various processes of semantic change and various ways of classify changes

Ø  Semantic change include:

·         Pejoration is process by means of a word assumes degradation of meaning.

Example:

- Secretary: means someone who works in an office, writing letters, making telephone calls and arranging meeting for a person or for an organization or an official who has responsibility foe general management of an organization.

Pejoration: The word secretary after undergoing to pejoration meaning. It then means an affair or the “second wife” (of the boss)

·         Amelioration is process where by a word acquire a more favorable meaning that it had before.

Example : Hut (gubuk)

The “hut” means a small, simple building usually consisting of one room.

Amelioration : Please come to my hut.

 Although the speaker said “my hut”. But in reality, his house is not a “hut” at all rather than a big house or a nice building. Even it is a beautiful house like a castle. In this situation, the word “hut” gets a more favorable meaning than it had before. It hut an amelioration meaning.

·         Narrowing is the meaning of the meaning of the word narrows to have a more specific meaning.

Example:

The word mete (‘meat’) in old English used to mean ‘food’. Its meaning has narrowed to mean ‘food’ in the form of animal flesh.

·         Widening is this type a word achieves a more general meaning.

Example: 

 ‘Brother’ is a man or boy with the same parents as another person or a man who is a member of the same group as you or shares an interest with you or has a similar way of thinking to you.

But now it can be used to call every man especially with the same age event we don’t know each other before.

Example : when I am on the bus then I want to have a sit beside a boy or a           men, I said to him  “ hay…. brother, may I sit here?” In those cases, the word has brother already got widening meaning.

2.3 Phonological Change

Phonology is the structure of sounds there have been many phonological changes.

Process of sound change

·         Assimilation, or the influence of one sound on an adjacent sound, is perhaps the most pervasive process. Assimilation processes changed Latin /k/ when followed by /i/ or /y/, first to /ky/, then to "ch", then to /s/, so that Latin faciat /fakiat/ 'would make' became fasse /fas/ in Modern French (the subjunctive of the verb faire'to make').

·         Dissimilation involves a change in one of two 'same' sounds that are adjacent or almost adjacent in a particular word such that they are no longer the same. Thus the first "l" in English colonel is changed to an "r", and the word is pronounced like "kernel". 

·         Metathesis involves the change in order of two adjacent sounds. Crystal cites Modern English third from OE thrid , and Modern English bird is a parallel example. But Modern English bright underwent the opposite change, its ancestor being beorht, and not all "vowel + r" words changed the relative order of these segments as happened withbird and third . Already by the time of Old English, there were two forms of the word for "ask": ascian andacsian. We don't know which form was metathesized from the other, but we do know that ascian won out in the standard language .

·         Prothesis and epenthesis are the introduction of additional sounds, initially and medially respectively. The addition of the /e/ that made Latin words like scola 'school' into Portuguese escola.

·         A merger that is currently expanding over much of the United States is the merger between "short o" and "long open o".

Short “o”	Long “o”
Cot	Caught
Hot	Haughty
Hock	Hawk
Stock	Stalk

3. How and why does language change?

   There are many different routes to language change. Changes can take originate in language learning, or through language contact, social differentiation, and natural processes in usage.

¨  Language learning: Language is transformed as it is transmitted from one generation to the next. Each individual must re-create a grammar and lexicon based on input received from parents, older siblings and other members of the speech community. The experience of each individual is different, and the process of linguistic replication is imperfect, so that the result is variable across individuals. However, a bias in the learning process -- for instance, towards regularization -- will cause systematic drift, generation by generation. In addition, random differences may spread and become 'fixed', especially in small populations.

¨  Language contact: Migration, conquest and trade bring speakers of one language into contact with speakers of another language. Some individuals will become fully bilingual as children, while others learn a second language more or less well as adults. In such contact situations, languages often borrow words, sounds, constructions and so on.

For example: English has borrowed numerous word from French like chemise, perfume, champagne, deluxe, ensemble, etc. From German associated with food like: sauerkraut, delicatessan, wiener, hamburger, and lager.

¨ Social differentiation. Social groups adopt distinctive norms of dress, adornment, gesture and so forth; language is part of the package. Linguistic distinctiveness can be achieved through vocabulary (slang or jargon), pronunciation (usually via exaggeration of some variants already available in the environment), morphological processes, syntactic constructions, and so on.