Language is a-changin'

On some level, we are all aware that English has changed. We need only look at an excerpt from Beowulf or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to see that. And though Shakespearean English is much easier to read and finally seems like our own language, footnotes are necessary here too. We have lots of evidence that English has changed in its phonology, morphology, and syntax, and that the meanings of many words have changed too. But seeing examples of language change in progress allows us to better understand that such changes are always ongoing and that it can be difficult to detect when we’re smack in the middle of a change.

Is today’s language just going down the tubes?
Despite the naturalness of language change and its pervasiveness throughout the history of any language, change is generally regarded by those living through it as a bad thing, as language degradation. Some of the reasons for this attitude have to do with the standardization of English, with mass literacy, and simply with the notion of “otherness”. If we hear an unusual word or linguistic structure, we tend to think that it is “wrong” or “bad”; the way we have learned it and the way we see it in print must be the “better” and “right” way. But looking at the historical record can help put these attitudes in perspective, allowing us to see that our attitudes about language change are based on what is familiar, not what is “correct”. For example, if someone today says bringed instead of brought, it might be viewed as quite “incorrect” according to some standard form of English. However, in older English, up through the 15th century, the accepted past tense of work was wrought; this form was viewed as the more “standard” form of the word. Now, of course, it is more accepted to use the regularized worked, though one can imagine the parents and teachers of the day cringing when their children said worked, as some may do now when they hear bringed. What started out as a quite patterned example of language variation, likely viewed as language degradation at the time, eventually became accepted by the people in positions of power and thus became the so-called “standard” form.

Maybe it's just human nature to resist change and with language change that resistance is really evident. However, acknowledging the naturalness and inevitability of language change, as well as its systematic and rule-governed nature, reminds us that the attitudes about language change (and variation) come not in response to the language itself, but in response to society’s attitudes towards the speakers of that language variety.

Why do languages change?
Because the acquisition of language is an innately-determined behavior, the same patterns of change will emerge in all languages. One of the primary motivations for sound change is ease of articulation; that is, phonetic and phonological changes come about as a result of making certain sequences of sounds easier to say. Some sound changes that took place before our spelling system was standardized are reflected in the spellings of the words. The prefix on words such as impossible and illegal used to be the regular prefix in- meaning ‘not’. However, this in- changed in certain words in order to make the sound sequences easier to say. So in + possible → impossible or in + legal → illegal. This process of assimilation--making one sound more like a neighboring sound in some way--is one of the most common processes in language change and language variation.

Another common reason for language change is regularization or analogy. For example, in Old English, there used to be many different ways to form the plurals of nouns. Those words which we now think of as having “irregular” plurals (oxen, geese, mice, women), were members of larger groups of nouns that formed their plurals in the same way. Gradually, by analogy and because of the tendency to regularize, the –s plural became the dominant form and other kinds of plural endings dropped out (for the most part).

Language contact, when one community of speakers comes into contact with speakers of another language, is another reason languages can change. Such contact can result not only in borrowing of words (as in the huge number of words English borrowed from French following the Norman Invasion of England in 1066), but in changes to the phonology, morphology, and syntax of a language. For example, English acquired a /v/ due primarily to the influence from French (which had a /v/) after the Norman Invasion. And American English acquired the names for many plants and animals (such as squash, raccoon, hickory, persimmon, moose, skunk) from various Native American languages, primarily languages of the Algonquin (or Algic) families of the East Coast. (Though the influence on English from Native American languages was quite minimal and all of the borrowed words are nouns, indicating a lack of any true mingling of cultures. Place names, including the names of 28 states, are from Native American languages (including one from Inuit and one from Hawaiian).)