Is English Changing?

Steve Kleinedler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351114059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Is English changing? To what degree is it changing? Is this change good or bad? In answering these questions, Is English Changing? provides a lively and concise introduction to language change, refuting commonly held misconceptions about language evolution as we understand it. Showing that English, like all living languages, has historically changed and continues to change, this book:

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• analyzes developments in the lexicon, the way words are spoken or written, and the way in which speakers and writers use words;

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• offers a basic overview of the major subfields of linguistics, including phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics, all viewed through the prism of language change;

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• discusses change over time with examples from Old English, Middle English, and Modern English;

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• reinforces important concepts with examples from other languages, including Spanish, Japanese, and Czech;

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• clearly defines key terms and includes advice on rules, usage, and style, as well as ample annotated further reading and activities throughout.

Aimed at undergraduate students with little or no prior knowledge of linguistics, this book is essential reading for those studying this topic for the first time.

Chapter 1
Introduction

1.0 Is English changing?

Actually, it is easy to answer the question that the title of this book poses. Yes, the English language is changing.

You have a powerful tool for analyzing language: yourself. Take a few moments and reflect on your personal experience as a person who uses language. You should easily be able to pinpoint events from the last 15 years of your life that reflect change in the English language (and in any other language you might speak in addition to English).

Now, let’s step back a little further in time.

• In the 1950s and 1960s, the Cold War escalated between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective spheres of influence. Both countries wanted to be the first to land a spacecraft on the moon. This space race led to increased interest in astronomy and physics across all levels of education and in the popular culture.
• In the 1970s and 1980s, the processing power of computers expanded exponentially. Completely new occupations that involved computer technology developed, including programming and data analysis. The use of computers to streamline business operations began to affect the way people dealt with hospitals, banks, educational institutions, and government agencies.
• In the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, the development and proliferation of the internet rapidly intensified the degree to which people used computer technology in most aspects of their lives. The way in which most people acquire news, get information, and maintain social connections changed drastically.

All of these developments had an effect on language. New words have entered the language. New senses of existing words have developed. There are new ways of communicating and exchanging information. Change is not a new phenomenon, however. Language change didn’t begin after World War II.

A thousand years ago, written language was passed from generation to generation by scribes and monks. In the mid-1400s, the invention of the printing press made the written word much more widely available. In the 1800s, the development of the telegraph meant that messages could be sent across vast distances in short periods of time. Each development that has improved the ability to communicate a message has led to the growth and spread of language. With this growth and spread comes change.

Written forms of language only go back several thousand years. Egyptian hieroglyphs date back almost 48 centuries. The unrecorded history of language goes back much further. Some theories of language development propose that language arose in one location and spread across the earth, and other theories propose that language sprung up independently in multiple locations. Regardless of which theory represents what actually happened, the language you speak is different than that of your parents, and of their parents, and so on, running backward through a multitude of generations. Indeed, the language you yourself speak is different from what you spoke last year, or 10 years ago.

1.1 Welcome to the field of linguistics

The study of language is called LINGUISTICS. This textbook is a broad overview of the field of linguistics. It is written for people who have had little exposure to linguistic terminology. It does not assume familiarity with the subject matter. By using simple vocabulary and avoiding complicated terminology and philosophy, I hope that you will find abstract or difficult concepts easier to grasp. You will be asked to observe how you use language. These observations will help guide your understanding of basic linguistic concepts.

Each chapter explores a different subfield, such as sound, structure, meaning, context, and variation. You will be introduced to these subfields with a brief overview. Then, we’ll look at features of that topic that show why yes is the answer to the question Is language changing?

Although linguistics refers to the study of language itself, this introductory textbook focuses primarily on linguistic phenomena in English. However, we will sometimes examine how some of the concepts being discussed manifest in other languages. If this survey of language and language change piques your interest, you are encouraged to pursue these topics at your educational institution or on your own.

Further study will provide you with the opportunity to learn how these components operate in a multitude of languages from many language families. If your school has a linguistics department, each of the topics we discuss is often the focus of an entire course, so if something interests you, look into it further! Regardless of the opportunities available to you at your school, you can also explore topics of interest in greater detail on your own. At the end of each chapter in this book, there will be a short list of books and online resources that expand upon some of the ideas addressed in the chapter.

The chief assertion of this chapter is that language is changing. The very act of expressing yourself keeps the language you’re using current and vital. So, let’s look at the flip side. What happens if there is no change? Languages that don’t change are dead languages. They are frozen. New words are not added because there are no native speakers left to use them to communicate.

An unknown number of languages have been lost forever. If a population died out or was forced to learn a new language by a conquering people, the language used by that population is lost if there is no written record of it. (Documenting endangered languages is an important area of linguistic research. The Endangered Language Project at www.endangeredlanguages.com is an excellent resource.)

Scholars have reconstructed a handful of languages without a written record – primarily languages that modern languages have descended from. This reconstruction has been accomplished by examining the similarities and differences in those modern languages and their earlier forms. The prefix proto – describes a reconstructed language that language families descend from. One such reconstructed language is Proto-Indo-European, a distant ancestor of English.

Sometimes, scholars have become aware of dead languages of antiquity because of written artifacts that exist, such as Sumerian (one of the first written languages) or Etruscan (the language of the ancient country of Etruria in present-day Italy). Other languages, such as Ubykh, a language once spoken in the Caucasus (and later, after the population emigrated, Turkey), have only more recently become dead languages as the last living speakers themselves have died.¹

Very rarely, a formerly dead language can be resuscitated. Perhaps the best-known example is Hebrew. Hebrew, as a spoken language, was displaced by Aramaic and other languages over time and eventually came to be used only in religious texts. In the late 1800s, Hebrew was revived as a spoken language when groups of Jews across the world began to learn it and use it instead of their native languages. More important to the process of reviving Hebrew, people who learned Hebrew as adults used it with their children. For these children, Hebrew was their native language. When the modern state of Israel was established in 1948, Hebrew was chosen as its national language. In the years since, millions of people have learned Hebrew as their first language.

Something you can do!

• List an example of a dead language from each continent.
• How many speakers did these languages have at their peak?
• What led to the extinction of these languages?

1.2 A brief comparison of Old English, Middle English, and Modern English

So far, we’ve only looked at a few broad, general statements regarding the fact that languages are changing, by virtue of their being used actively by speakers and writers for communication. A simple examination of historical English texts will easily demonstrate that the English language has changed considerably since Old English began to become distinct from other West Germanic languages around the sixth century CE. (Other West Germanic languages include German and Dutch; historically, the West Germanic language closest to English is Frisian, a language of the northern Netherlands.)

1.2.1 Old English

One of the earliest known works written in English is Beowulf, a poem written in Old English sometime between the 8th and 11th centuries. The name of its author is unknown. This poem tells the tale of a hero named Beowulf who defeats a monster named Grendel. Beowulf becomes king of an area that is now part of Sweden. Here are the first few lines of this poem:

Hwæt, we Gar-Dena	in gear-dagum
þeod-cyninga	þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas	ellen fremedon.

This is Old English, and it is almost entirely unrecognizable to speakers of Modern English. There are unfamiliar letters:

• the ASH, æ, pronounced like the ‘a’ in bat
• the THORN, þ, pronounced like the ‘th’ in thin
• the EDH, ð, pronounced like the ‘th’ in the

The only word in this passage that is the same in Modern English is in. (Hu, meaning “how,” comes close.)

Beowulf has been translated in Modern English by many Old English scholars. The Irish poet Seamus Heaney published Beowulf: A New Verse Translation in 2012. In it, this passage reads as follows:

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.

For comparison, here’s how the first few lines of an earlier translation from 1910 reads. It is from the Harvard Classics series, translated by American educator Francis Gummere:

O, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!

The phrase in gear-dagum, for example, is translated in the Heaney version as “in days gone by” and in the Gummere version as “in days long sped.”

Let’s dig deeper and pick apart piece by piece the components of the Old English word gear-dagum. You’ll start to see a few more similarities. In Old English, g before certain vowels, including e, is pronounced more like y. In fact, Old English gear means “year.”

Something you can do!

An ETYMOLOGY shows the path a word has taken to get to its present form. Consult a dictionary that includes etymologies, so that you can see how the word year developed over the past centuries into its present Modern English form. Here are three dictionary entries for the word year:

• American Heritage Diction...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Speech sounds
• 3 Word structure
• 4 Sentence structure
• 5 Word meaning
• 6 Context
• 7 Society and culture
• 8 Rules, usage, and style
• 9 Conclusion
• References
• Societies, associations, and university projects
• Index