Language Change

1. LANGUAGE CHANGE
Part One
Notes from
“Language Change: Progress or Decay?”
By Jean Aitchison

2. The inevitability of change
 “There can never be a moment of true
standstill in language….By nature it is a
continuous process of development.”
Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1836
 BUT through the ages, especially from the
18th
century, many people have feared,
regretted, condemned and resented signs of
language change

3. Possible views of language change 1
1. Change = Decay
 In 18th
and 19th
century many scholars were convinced that the
European languages were in decline, e.g. by losing word-endings
(inflexions): “The history of all the Aryan languages is nothing but
a gradual process of decay” (Max Muller)
1. Change = Progress
 Languages may be slowly evolving to a more efficient state,
adapting to the needs of the times, e.g. English losing its
complicated word-ending system and becoming more streamlined:
“In the evolution of languages the discarding of old flexions goes
hand in hand with the development of simpler and more regular
expedients that are rather less liable than the old ones to produce
misunderstanding” (Otto Jespersen, 1922)

4. Possible views of language change 2
3. Change as a neutral process
 Language remains in a substantially similar state from the point of
view of progress or decay: it may be marking time or treading
water, with its advance or decline held in check by opposing
forces: “Progress in the absolute sense is impossible, just as it is in
morality or politics. It is simply that different states exist,
succeeding each other, each dominated by certain general laws
imposed by the equilibrium of the forces with which they are
confronted. So it is with language.” (Joseph Vendryes, Belgian
linguist)

5. The long tradition of lamenting
language change: 1
 Many of the objections to change are rooted in social prejudices: unease
about standards in language are often associated with social class
differences
 Another source of complaints is the resentment and fear of all changes in
the world we live in: change = disturbance of our habitual views of life,
and language is one obvious sign of such change
 “Every generation inevitably believes that the clothes, manners and
speech of the following one have deteriorated. We would therefore
expect to find a respect for conservative language in every century and
every culture and, in literate societies, a reverence for the language of the
‘best authors’ of the past.” (Jean Aitchison)

6. The long tradition of lamenting
language change: 2
 The 18th
century writers were
particularly concerned about the
decline of the language
 Jonathan Swift, the writer of
Gulliver’s Travels, attacked the
decayed condition of English in
The Tatler in 1710
 He later wrote to the Lord
Treasurer urging the foundation
of an academy to regulate
language usage: in his view, even
the best writers commit “many
gross improprieties which ought
to be discarded.”

7. The long tradition of lamenting
language change: 3
 Samuel Johnson stated in his
plan for his dictionary that he
meant to purify and preserve the
language
 By the time he actually produced
his famous Dictionary of 1755, he
had to admit in the Preface that
change is inevitable
 Typically, he saw change as
decline: “Tongues, like
governments, have a natural
tendency to degeneration.”

8. The long tradition of lamenting
language change: 4
 Robert Lowth, the Bishop of
London, complained in 1762
that “the English Language hath
been much cultivated during the
last 200 years..but..it hath made
no advances in Grammatical
accuracy”
 Even “our best Authors … have
sometimes fallen into mistakes,
and been guilty of palpable error
in point of Grammar”
 Lowth published a very
successful A Short Introduction to
English Grammar in 1762

9. The long tradition of lamenting
language change: 5
 Why were 18th
century writers so concerned about the English language?
1 Admiration for Latin
 Latin was the language of the church until the emergence of the
Protestant churches
 It was still important in the law and much of European scholarly study
was in Latin
 The classical Greek and Latin writers were an essential part of the
education of the elite
 Latin was regarded as “the queen of tongues” (Ben Jonson) and Latin
grammar was seen as a model for describing all languages – e.g. Latin had
inflexions (word-endings) and English was seen as a decayed language
because it had lost its inflexions
 It had the advantage of being a ‘fixed’ language (i.e. no longer a living
language) and existing only as a written form

10. The long tradition of lamenting
language change: 5 (cont.)
 Why were 18th
century writers so concerned about the English
language?
2. Class snobbery
 There was a widespread feeling that the upper classes should be
regarded as the model for the lower classes
 Johnson in his dictionary took middle and upper class usage as his
model in order to “refine our language to grammatical purity, and
to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and
irregular combinations.”

11. 20th
century complaints:
 “the growing unintelligibility of spoken English” (late 1960s)
 “I have a queasy distaste for the vulgarity of of ‘between you and I’, ‘these sort’, ‘the media
is’…precisely the kind of distaste I feel at seeing a damp spoon dipped in the sugar bowl or
butter spread with the bread-knife.” (late 1960s)
 “the only sadness is that the current editor seems prepared to bow to every slaphappy and
slipshod change of meaning” (review of 1978 edition of The Pocket Oxford Dictionary)
 “The standard of speech and pronunciation in England has declined so much…that one is
almost ashamed to let foreigners hear it” (newspaper article, 1982)
 “the abuse of our beautiful language..We go out of our way to promulgate incessantly..the
very ugliest sounds and worst possible grammar” (letter to newspaper, 1986)
 “We seem to be moving…towards a social and linguistic situation in which nobody says or
writes or probably knows anything more than an approximation to what he or she means”
(article, 1990)

12. Prescriptive and Descriptive
Approaches
 Even today, many people want to take a ‘purist’ attitude to language, especially in
matters of grammar – they believe there is somewhere (usually in the past) an
absolute standard of correctness which is often based on the usage of a social
class
 Lowth’s ‘rules’ of grammar from 1762 have been surprisingly influential and
persistent - he was explicit about his intention: “the principal design of a
Grammar of any Language is to teach us to express ourselves with propriety…
and to be able to judge of every phrase and form of construction, whether it be
right or not. The plain way of doing this is to lay down rules.”
 Many people have similar attitudes today – they have a prescriptive approach,
concerned with ‘correctness’ and absolute ‘rules’
 The more modern approach is descriptive, concerned with the way language is
actually used in society; modern linguists see spoken and written language as
different and accept the spoken form as the primary form of language