Language change and factors Factors include

Language change and factors

Factors include:

Fads. Sometimes it becomes fashionable to imitate the speech of a prestigious person or group as a sign of sympathy or solidarity. William Labov has discussed this factor in great detail concerning the loss and restoration of historical post-vocalic r in New York City.

Invasions. Sometimes a more powerful or culturally advanced group imposes itself on another group. In the history of English, this happened after the Norman Conquest, when English was reduced in status and functionality from a national language to a patois.

Disease and catastrophes. During the 14th century more thn half the population of London succumbed to the black death. The city’s population had previously spoken a southern dialect of Middle English, but the city was eventually reppopulated primarily by people speaking northern dialects. Hence, English continued, but with a somewhat different phonology and with many words and features of Old Norse origin, such as the verb form are and the third person singular present verb ending, sees rather than seeth establishing themselves and eventually prevailing.

Technological developments. The advent of computers has generated hundreds of new terms and concepts in addition to giving already existing words such as mouse, memory, and crash new meanings.

Peaceful language contact. Contact with Anglo-American culture has resulted in the borrowing or translation of many English words and idioms into the languages of Europe and elsewhere since the end of WW II. One of my favorites is the informal Russian verb фулараундоваться ‘to fool around’.

Mass media. The ability to preserve texts in speech and writing has arguably inhibited change, at least in certain registers. Change does, of course, continue in the most informal registers and the eventual result could be diglossia.

Weakening of and increased competition with institutions that once maintained acceptable middle-class standards, democratization, if you will. The church and the schools have to compete with the mass media and popular culture as concerns matters of appropriateness and grammatical correctess. What the fuck!? I ain’t never seen nothing like that. would once have been widely regarded as incorrect, vulgar, or substandard. Now you cannot avoid hearing such utteranceson television programs or in movies produced in many English-speaking countries, nor are such utterances as taboo in everyday public discourse as they once were.

The most common, and trivial, type of language change is the borrowing of words from another language. If, however, the two languages are phonologically quite different, a flood of new words from a specific, prestigious source can bring about the establishment of new phonemes or phonemic oppositions in the recipient language. Fifty years ago most Finns pronounced the word biologia as ['piolokiɜ], since Finnish had no voiced stops and thus lacked an opposition between voiced and voiceless stops. Now Finnish children are exposd to English and Swedish at an early age, and scientific termsas well as the names of international brands containing voiced stops are increasingly used in everyday discourse more than they were two generations ago. Thus Finnish has now developed an opposition between voiced and voiceless stops, even if the voiced members of the pair are limited to technical vocabulary and, increasingly, slang, e.g. broidi ‘brother’ , gimma ‘girl’, daisarit ‘tits’.