Language change Definitions and Examples

Language change
Definitions and Examples
My grandparents did not talk the way I talk. For example, my mother’s father never used the Minangkabaunese word piriang referring to a plate. Instead, he always said cipia. My mother said the same word; however, I have never said that word, and even in childhood I considered it strange. Other today’s young people also have very likely noticed that their parents or their grandparents speak or spoke a little differently from them. And, if they have children or grandchildren, they have almost certainly heard their children saying things that they would never say. Everywhere we can observe that we might find differences in speech between the generations. Each generation speaks a little differently because our language is always changing. And not just our language: every language is always changing. There is no such thing as a living language that fails to change. This is a piece of truth on which we can rely absolutely. The example illustrated above, again, shows that languages always change. On a personal level, in day-to-day communication; however, this may not be easily apparent or obvious. We are so intimately connected to our language that we may fail to see its changes, in much the same way that our closeness to our children obscures perception of their development. But languages do indeed change. Some languages flourish and expand and some languages die. The above illustration depicts how the communication pattern in one family shifts from one language to another until communication between generations becomes difficult or ceases altogether. This is often the case in immigrant families as the children integrate into mainstream society and begin to lose their home language. Another example of language change is the observation in Pohnpei that the “high language” of respect used by the royal clan and also to address them is slowly dying out with a diminishing number of people capable of speaking it (Tawerilmang 1996). There is a widespread legend about a remarkable village, as quoted in Trask (2010: 1), in the Appalachians or in Derbyshire or somewhere distant from London and New York, where the locals still speak pure and unchanged Elizabethan English. It does not exist. Nobody on earth has spoken Elizabethan English since the time of Queen Elizabeth I, around 400 yearsago. Similarly, there is nobody alive today who speaks Minagkabaunese English the way Yahya Datuak Kayo spoke it, or the way Syekh Djamil Djambek spoke it, or the way Agus Salim spoke it, or the way Buya Hamka spoke it. What is the coloured stuff that women sometimes put on their cheeks called? The first recorded English name for this stuff is ‘paint’, recorded from 1660. In those days, both men and women of certain social classes painted their faces: you may have seen the garishly painted faces of the dandies in portraits of the time. In 1753, a new word appeared in English: ‘rouge’. The first writer to use this French word thought it necessary to explain to his readers that rouge was the same thing as paint. But rouge soon displaced paint, and it remained the usual English word for around two centuries. In the 1950s, ‘rouge’ was the only word anybody ever used. Then, in 1965, an advertisement coined a new word for the product: ‘blusher’. This word has gradually displaced ‘rouge’. When English people recently heard a fashionable young woman call it ‘rouge’, they almost fell over with astonishment because they had not heard anyone use the word for decades, and associated it with styles which were already ancient (Trask, 2010:2). The example illustrated above shows that language change results from the differential propagation of linguistic variants distributed among the linguistic repertoires of communicatively interacting individuals in a given community. In addition, Michael (2015:484) says that language change is socially mediated in two important ways. First, since language change is a social-epidemiological process that takes place by propagating some aspect of communicative practice across socially structured networks, the organization of social groups can affect how variants propagate. It is known, for example, that densely connected social networks tend to be resistant to innovations, whereas more sparsely connected ones are more open to them. Second, social and cultural factors, such as language ideologies, can encourage the propagation of particular variants at the expense of others in particular contexts, likewise contributing to language change.