Why Languages Change

Phonetics and the IPA 8 showed that in a single sentence going to can become gonna and handbag can become [ˈhæmbæɡ]. Now ask what happens when changes like that are repeated by millions of speakers for a thousand years. The answer is that one language becomes several, and that is the subject of this course.

Change Is Normal

Wikipedia's article on language change defines it as the alteration of a language's features, or of languages in general, over time. It usually happens gradually, with old and new forms coexisting for a while. The same article rejects the word "corruption": innovations cannot be judged good or bad scientifically. Modern English descends from Old English, and the two are different enough that a modern speaker cannot read the older form without study.

Two Ways of Looking at a Language

Historical linguistics is mainly diachronic. The article gives a neat reason why the two views need each other: synchronic forms result from earlier diachronic changes. English sing / sang / sung looks irregular today, but it reflects a once-regular Indo-European vowel-change system.

The field rests on the uniformitarian principle: processes of change seen today were likely at work in the past, unless evidence suggests otherwise. That is why watching English change now is evidence for how it changed before.

What Changes

Meaning change in detail

Wikipedia's article on semantic change uses Bloomfield's 1933 scheme and gives these dated cases:

Chapter 7 returns to meaning change and to grammar change.

Why Does It Happen?

The language-change article lists these causes:

• Economy: least effort, leading to reductions like going to to gonna.
• Expressiveness: overused language loses intensity.
• Analogy: forms are reshaped on the pattern of other forms.
• Language contact, cultural change and migration.
• Imperfect learning.
• Social prestige: the loss of rhoticity in Received Pronunciation is the page's example.

Is Change Regular?

The Neogrammarians held that sound change is "regular", affecting all relevant words at once. Wikipedia's article says this is controversial, though useful as a heuristic. Chapters 2 and 3 develop the idea, because the whole comparative method depends on sound change being regular enough to track.

What Historical Linguistics Asks

• How and why do languages change?
• Which languages are related, and how are they grouped into families?
• What did ancestral (proto-) languages look like?
• How did a language's structures develop from earlier forms?
• Where do words come from, and how have their forms and meanings changed (etymology)?
• How do social and cultural factors shape language development?

The main methods are the comparative method (comparing related languages to infer shared ancestry and reconstruct proto-languages) and internal reconstruction (inferring earlier forms from patterns within one language). Modern historical linguistics dates from the late 18th century, grew out of philology, and began with Indo-European and Uralic languages.

Conventions Used in This Course

Try It Yourself