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.
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Famous quotes containing the words language and/or change:
“In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we do not know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.”
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“The higher the mountain on which you stand, the less change in the prospect from year to year, from age to age. Above a certain height there is no change.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)