It is not uncommon for people to view their language as relatively static and to assume that there is only one way to speak it correctly. Language, however, changes from generation to generation. In his book Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a Pure Standard English, linguist John McWhorter writes:
“Any language is always and forever on its way to changing into a new one, with many of the sounds, word meanings, and sentence patterns we process as ‘sloppy’ and ‘incorrect’ being the very things that will constitute the ‘proper’ language of the future.”
Language is a part of culture and one of the characteristics of culture is that it is continually changing to meet environmental and social challenges. Anthropologist Harry Hoijer, in his essay on language change in Language in Culture and Society: A Reader in Linguistics and Anthropology, writes:
“Changes in one aspect of a culture must inevitably result, sooner or later, in changes in all other aspects.”
In his book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, David Anthony reports:
“Most normal spoken languages over the course of a thousand years undergo change enough that speakers at either end of the millennium, attempting a conversation, would have difficulty understanding each other.”
Languages do not change evenly over time: they change at different rates. Some languages seem to change very slowly, while others seem to change quite rapidly. David Anthony writes:
“A language that borrows many words and phrases from another language changes more rapidly than one with a low borrowing rate.”
In addition, changes in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary occur at different rates and at different times.
Languages do not change in a particular direction or with a particular goal. While linguists study past changes, they cannot predict future changes. Languages do not evolve from lower forms into higher forms. At the same time, language change is not random. David Anthony writes:
“Language change is not random; it flows in the direction of accents and phrases admired and emulated by large numbers of people.”
Briefly described below are are some of the mechanisms by which languages change.
Generational Change
Each generation changes the language with new vocabulary, different pronunciations, and new forms and grammar and syntax. Each generation shows that it is different from the generation of its parents. In the second edition of their textbook An Introduction to Linguistics: Language, Grammar and Semantics, Pushpinder Syal and D. V. Jindal write:
“Language seems to be in a state of continual transition because of its cultural transmission from one generation to the next. Each new generation has to find to find a way of using or learning the language of the previous generation.”
Differences between generations regarding ways of speaking and vocabulary is very apparent in slang. Slang often comes from young people and is used as a way of showing belonging, of group identity. Slang is often very transient and within a generation the new words and new styles of speaking are often forgotten or sound a little dated.
Semantic Drift
With regard to changes in words, and particularly word meanings, semantic drift describes gradual change in meaning for a word. In his book Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a Pure Standard English, John McWhorter writes:
“…the meaning of words is also constantly changing in any language.”
In general, linguists talk about five basic kinds of semantic change:
Generalization: a word’s meaning gets broader over time. For example, the English word aroma used to mean smell of spices. The English word bird once described only small birds but has now broadened to describe all birds.
Narrowing: a word’s meaning gets narrower over time. For example, the English word meat used to mean solid food of any kind. At one point in time, the English word hound was used in reference to all dogs, while now it refers to a subset of dogs.
Amelioration: this happens when a word’s meaning improves or becomes more positive over time. For example: the English word nice used to mean silly, foolish, simple.
Pejoration: this happens when a word’s meaning becomes more negative over time. For example, the English word notorious used to mean well-known and awful meant worthy of awe.
Metaphorical extension: a word’s meaning is extended through a metaphorical comparison. Thus, in English, crane which originally referred to a kind of bird is now used to describe a piece of equipment at a construction site.
Innovation
As a culture adopts or invents new things, words describing these new things will also emerge. Harry Hoijer writes:
“As a people acquire, by invention or borrowing, cultural innovations of any sort, there are inevitable additions to their vocabulary.”
With the invention of the computer, for example, new verbs such as “to google” entered into the English language.
Not all new words are necessarily coined from the need to give names to new things. In his book The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left, David Crystal writes:
“Studies of Shakespeare’s vocabulary suggest that he alone coined around 1,700 words, half of which became a permanent part of the language.”
David Crystal goes on to report:
“The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that some 800 words are attributed to Thomas Nashe, 500 to Spenser, and 400 to Sidney, and several other authors have significant numbers too.”
Cultural Borrowing
Human societies rarely, if ever, exist in isolation from other societies. There the diffusion of material culture as well as ideas about religion and social organization from one culture to another is relatively common. While Shakespeare contributed many new words to English, many words also came into English during his life which were borrowed from other languages. In his book Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, Seth Lerer writes:
“During the six decades of Shakespeare’s life, more words entered the English language than at any other time in history. Science and commerce, exploration and colonial expansion, literature and art—all contributed to an increased vocabulary drawn from Latin, Greek, and the European and non-European languages. While the lexicon of Old English took only 3 percent of its vocabulary from elsewhere, nearly 70 percent of our modern English lexicon comes from non-English sources.”
When parts of material culture are borrowed from another culture, the language borrowing also comes from that culture. In her book Ancestral Journeys, Jean Manco writes:
“The inventors of a technology are the first to name it. Others who adopt the technology often adopt the name for it as well.”
In his book Origins of the English Language: A Social and Linguistic History, Joseph Williams points out several languages which have contributed words to modern English. Some of these include:
Spanish: cafeteria, marijuana, vigilante, burro, alfalfa
Italian: casino, vendetta, influenza, trombone, viola
German: shale, quartz, waltz, semester, seminar
Arabic: ghoul, candy, safari
Persian: lilac, khaki, shawl
Turkic: vampire, coffee, tulip
Sanskrit/Hindi: pajamas, cashmere, dingy, mugger, loot
Word Death
As languages add new words through innovation and through borrowing, other words die; that is, people stop using them. In his book Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, Seth Lerer writes:
“Why do certain words survive in language and why do others disappear? Impede and expede show up in the seventeenth century, but only impede lives on. Adopted survives, but not adepted (meaning ‘attained’). Commit and transmit were coined and stayed on, but demit (meaning ‘send away’) vanished. Adnichiate (to reduce to nothing) is gone; eximious (‘excellent’) is lost to time; temulent (‘drunk’) forgotten.”
In his book The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten, Jeffrey Kacirk writes:
“The English language, as the largest and most dynamic collection of words and phrases ever assembled, continues to expand, absorbing hundreds of words annually into its official and unofficial roles, but not without a simultaneous yet imperceptible sacrifice of terms along the way.”
Word death may be associated with the death of certain occupations and therefore the disappearance of the words that reflect or describe these occupations. Jeffrey Kacirk provides an example:
“Take, for example, the long-defunct activity called upknocking, the employment of the knocker up, who went house to house in the early morning hours of the nineteenth century to awaken his working-class clients before the advent of affordable alarm clocks.”
Grammaticalization
Language is more than just a collection of words. John McWhorter puts it this way:
“A language is more than just a basket of words—you could know five thousand of them in a language and be miserably unable to communicate even the most basic sentiments without also knowing how to put the words together. A language is not only its words but also its grammar.”
One of the processes in the ongoing change in grammar is grammaticalization, the process whereby a word becomes a piece of grammar. In this process a word loses meaning per se and becomes a grammatical marker. In English, two common examples are the (an eroded version of that) and a (which came from ān, meaning one).
More About Language
Language 201: The Indo-European Language Family
Origins of English: Standard English
Origins of Language: Language Acquisition
Origins of Language: Language Death
A Very Short History of the English Language
A Very Short Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics