Causes of Language Change
- Economy: Speakers tend to make their utterances as efficient and effective as possible to reach communicative goals. Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs and benefits.
- the principle of least effort: Speakers especially use economy in their articulation, which tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms. See vowel reduction, cluster reduction, lenition, and elision. After some time a change may become widely accepted (it becomes a regular sound change) and may end up treated as a standard. For instance: going to → gonna or, with examples of both vowel reduction → and elision →, → .
- Analogy: reducing word forms by likening different forms of the word to the root.
- Language contact: borrowing of words and constructions from foreign languages.
- The medium of communication.
- Cultural environment: Groups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and objects in their language, whether they encounter different people there or not.
Read more about this topic: Language Change
Famous quotes containing the words language and/or change:
“Strange goings on! Jones did it slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight. What he did was butter a piece of toast. We are too familiar with the language of action to notice at first an anomaly: the ‘it’ of ‘Jones did it slowly, deliberately,...’ seems to refer to some entity, presumably an action, that is then characterized in a number of ways.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“Humph! Talkin’ ‘bout me lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)