What is language change?
What about language can change?
What causes language change?
“Time-based shifts in a language’s features”
This can affect any element of the grammar or lexicon of language
It is largely unpreventable
There is no moment when any language is not shifting
Only dead languages stop changing
Often starting in smaller communities and spreading to general populations
Today’s sociolinguistic variation could be tomorrow’s language change
Occasionally happens from the top down
Any element of grammar is a potential element of change
Some elements have more resistance to change
Writing systems are now conventionalized and uniformity is enforced (e.g. spellcheck, autocorrect)
Content words (nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives) change more than function words (prepositions, affixes, determiners, pronouns, conjunctions…)
Shifts in speech sound pronunciation
Addition or loss of individual sounds
Shifts in the rules governing sounds
What sound changes have you seen?
Changes to word spellings
Changes to usage of the writing system
Development of a new writing system
What spelling changes have you seen?
Changes to the syntactic structures of the language (e.g. ‘Peas, I like’ or ‘Bought a car, he did!’)
Gain or loss of major grammatical functions (e.g. cases, markings)
Have you seen this?
Addition of new words and morphemes
The loss or fading of words and morphemes
We’ve talked all about new words this quarter!
Word meanings becoming broader (e.g. ‘socialist’)
Word meanings becoming narrower (e.g. ‘liberal’)
Word meanings becoming more negative (‘pejoration’) (e.g. ‘retarded’ or ‘handicapped’)
Word meanings becoming more positive (‘amelioration’) (e.g. ‘renegade’)
Word meanings becoming entirely different (e.g. ‘spam’)
What semantic shifts have you seen?
Change to the culture/world
Economy and Ease
Semantic Shifts
Language Contact
Which of these have you seen?
Social Changes and migrations
Analogy and Reanalysis
Change during learning
Which of these have you seen?
Luckily, it’s generally great!
Language often drifts towards learnability
It moves with changing cultures
… and prepares us to talk about the future
See #the-class-meme on Discord
Take the last person’s post and build on it
Anything goes (within the content guidelines)