An introduction to linguistic variation and change

No language ever remains the same. Each language is constantly changing to suit its’ speakers and the world around them. Some of these changes are very sudden; however others take hundreds of years. Linguists have tried to track these changes using the ‘comparative method’ to find historical relationships between languages.

American linguists in the 20^th century studiesd lexicostatistics in a study called glottochronology. In this, they wanted to see the rate at which a language has changed and the length of time since two languages diverged. In this study, sets of vocabulary were compared to each other and any recognised cognates are counted. Any words that are completely different show that the languages have changed. Percentages were taken to compare these and any pair of languages with 50% similarity were said to have diverged before a language which had 70% similarity. This technique was able to find family trees of many different sets of languages. They also found that over time, every feature of language changes, but most frequently variations occur in pronunciation and vocabulary.

Changes in sound

Grimm (1822) noticed some regular ‘sound shifts’ between neighbouring languages. For example, when a word began [p] in Sanskrit, Latin or Greek, the Germanic languages used an [f]. For example: ‘pater’ (Latin) became ‘father’ (English). Nine sound changes like this were identified and these are very regular. But Grimm’s law did not explain all of the changes toward Germanic languages. There are many other types of changes in sound over languages, such as ‘loss’ where a sound completely disappears from a language.

Grammatical changes

The main way in which grammatical systems change is called analogy. This is when irregular grammatical patterns are changed into regulars. For example, in Anglo saxon, ‘healp’ was the past tense of ‘helpan’ (help) but in the 14^th century the past tense began to be the ‘helped’ with the usual ending.

Semantic change

Semantics can vary very quickly because they relate very closely to life and culture of society. An example of this is called ‘amelioration’ which is when a word loses its previous negative tone. For example, mischievous used to mean ‘disastrous’, but now is used to mean ‘up to mischief’ which is much milder.