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Types Of Language Change - Coggle Diagram
Types Of Language Change
Catalysts
These are factors that speed up the change of langauge
People can shift due to these consciously or unconsciously
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Speaker Innovation
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“We are constantly using our creative abilities to make sense of words we have never met before, as well as to make new interpretations of old words.”
— Deborah Cameron, 1995
Lexical Diffusion
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the 'ough' phoneme is really difficult because
'Trough' and 'tough' stayed roughly the same but
'Though' and 'bough' changed
Jean Aitchison (1981/2013)
Lexical change is messy and gradual
Lexical change impacts the pronunciation of certain phonemes
Eg 'record'.
Both the verb and noun had the emphasis on the 2nd syllable
But by 1570 the noun had emphasis on the 1st syllable whilst the verb stayed the same
Conscious
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Labov's NY study (1966)
Labov went into 3 different shops of varying status and looked for a rhotic 'r' by asking for something on the "fourth floor"
Found that the higher the shop prestige, the more likely a rhotic 'r' was used
Links conscious change of language to status
Unconscious
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Labov's Martha's Vineyard study shows unconscious language change
Labov found that the islanders changed their vowel sounds to sound more like the older fishermen than the tourists to try and seperate from them
Many did this shift without even realising
Orthographical
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The current alphabet uses the Roman alphabet
Introduced c500
Similar to OE (old english) but OE had extra consonants that weren't used in the Roman alphabet
In OE consonants J, Q, V, K, Z were rarely used
When the printing press was introduce, Caxton made the East Midlands dialect the base for regulated
(Despite having inconsistencies like for the word 'book' there is 'boke' and 'booke'
The Great Vowel shift (c14th century to c18th century) made the Caxton 'regulated' vowel sounds different as many vowels sounds lengthened as they were pronounced closer to the roof of the mouth
This widened the gap between graphemes and phonemes
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