These are summaries of the Linguistics course: Language variation and change. These summaries are both based on the book of Aitchinson, as the main information of the lessons.
Aitchison, J. (2013). Language Change: Progress or Decay? 4th ed. - Summary Chapters 7,8,9
Aitchison, J. (2013). Language Change: Progress or Decay? 4th ed. - Summary Chapters 4,5,6
Aitchison, J. (2013). Language Change: Progress or Decay? 4th ed. - Summary Chapters 12, 13
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Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA)
Engelse Taal en Cultuur, English Language and Culture
Linguistics - Language variation and change
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Chapter 10: The reason why
Sociolinguistic causes of change
There is a huge number of possible causes to language change to take into consideration. Part of the
problem is that there are several different causative factors at work, not only in language as a
whole, but also in any one change. Language change is likely to be due to a combination of factors.
There are 2 broad categories to language change:
1. External sociolinguistic factors: social factors outside the language system
2. Internal psycholinguistic factors: linguistic and psychological factors which reside in the
structure of the language and the minds of the speakers
There are three proposed sociolinguistic factors: (1) fashion, (2) foreign influence, and (3) social
need.
An extreme view held by a minority of linguists is that language change is an entirely random and
fortuitous affair, and that fashions in language are as unpredictable as fashion in clothes.
Charles Hockett suggested that when we utter a speech sound, we are aiming at a certain ideal
target. But since words are usually comprehensible even if every sound is not perfectly articulated,
speakers often get careless, and don’t trouble too much about hitting the bull’s eye each time. The
actual shots will cluster round a single point at which there will be a ‘frequency maximum’. After
quite a lot of shots miss the target, people hear numerous near misses. Eventually they begin to
think the bull’s eye is in a different place.
There are 3 reason why fashion and wandering targets cannot be considered as major causes of
language change:
1. If sound wandered randomly, language would soon end up in a chaos
Language remains a well-organized patterned whole
2. Similar changes tend to recur in quite unconnected languages, this cannot be considered
chance
3. There seem to be hidden and inbuilt constraints concerning which elements can change in a
language
Fashion changes are a triggering factor, something which may set of a tendency whose deeper
causes lie hidden beneath the surface.
Substratum theory
When immigrants come into a new area, or when an indigenous population learns the language of
newly arrived conquerors, they learn their adopted language imperfectly. They then hand on these
slight imperfections to their children and to other people in their social circle, and eventually alter
the language.
In this type of situation the adopted language does not always move in the direction of the
substratum language. Sometimes immigrants attempt to overcorrect what they feel to be a faulty
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