Introducing English Linguistics

C H A P T E R
The
development
of English
2
This chapter focuses on the development of the English lan-
guage as well as some general principles of language
change. It not only describes how English has changed but
offers explanations for the changes. The first section con-
tains an overview of the current state of the language: how
many people speak English vs. the other major languages of
the world, and how calculating the number of speakers of a
language is complicated by the many difficulties one
encounters in distinguishing a language from a dialect. The
next section describes the two principal ways of classifying
languages: the genetic system of classification, which
groups languages into family trees and traces their historical
development through the process of linguistic reconstruc-
tion, and the typological system of classification, which
focuses more on language similarities than differences and
classifies languages in a manner that is aligned with the
notion of language universals. The chapter concludes with a
discussion of language “change” vs. language “evolution,”
i.e. whether it is justified to claim that evolutionary changes
in biology parallel those in language, and with a considera-
tion of other hypotheses that have been advanced to
explain how and why languages change.
CHAPTER PREVIEW
Cognate
vocabulary
Comparative
method
Dialect
Genetic
classification
Internal/external
influences on
language
change
Language
Language death
Linguistic
reconstruction
Synchronic/
diachronic change
Typological
classification
KEY TERMS

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In the lectures published in A Course in General Linguistics, Saussure made
the distinction between