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:
“Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man’s being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone. Although, in daily life, we do not always distinguish these words, we should do so consistently and thus deepen our understanding of our human predicament.”
—Paul Tillich (1886–1965)
“Thus change the forms of being. Thus arise
Races of living things, glorious in strength,
And perish, as the quickening breath of God
Fills them, or is withdrawn.”
—William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878)