Language Change
Language is always changing –- how can we tell? Two easy ways. First, that we can’t easily read the language from 500 years ago. Second, that older generations are always complaining about how “kids these days” speak, implying that their language is subtly different than that of their parents and grandparents (though not different enough that they can’t understand one another).
Language Relationships
Languages are “related” to each other in families. As languages change through time, they also split into different languages. Because languages change in systematic ways, we can use those changes to recover the history of language change through time, including how closely related to each other different languages are. Language relationships can be represented on trees, where languages which split in the more recent past are shown as closer together. Of course, language split is a lot more complicated than this. Some languages, like Michif, have more than one “parent” language; because most of the world speaks more than one language, practically all the world’s languages have “borrowings” –- speakers include features of other languages in their speech. English, for example, has a lot of vocabulary from French and Latin. This tool from the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary allows you to highlight what words are from which language and their earliest attestation. This TedEd talk (written by exhibit curator Claire Bowern) traces the history of the English language.
Phylogenetics
The early development of evolution in biology owes a lot to discussion of language change. This work also came to the attention of William Dwight Whitney, the first person to teach linguistics at Yale and to offer a class on linguistics in the USA (see Yale section). Over the years the connections between the two disciplines have been more or less close but these days a major part of the study of historical linguistics involves evolutionary approaches around variation, selection, and transmission. This is another way of tying language back to culture, since the language trees can then be used in studying cultural change across thousands of years. Below is an image from Charles Darwin's notebooks showing a tree diagram.
How Languages Change
Not everyone uses language in the same way. Over time, these variations build up, and when they become particularly clustered and associated with a particular region or group, new languages split and form. Languages inevitably change over time for three main reasons. One is that as children learn language, they come to slightly different conclusions about the features and grammar of their language as compared to older generations, simply because they have slightly different input data. Secondly, there are ways in which language is processed and produced which make certain types of changes slightly more likely. Thirdly, there is, as we saw before, a social component to language, and as features of language (such as words or pronunciations) become associated with particular groups, they may spread more or less easily.
Featured Titles
Sign language archaeology: understanding the historical roots of American Sign Language
by Ted Supalla and Patricia Clark
This is an intricate book about the history of ASL in America, and how ASL has changed over the last 100 years.
The comparative approach in evolutionary anthropology and biology
by Charles L. Nunn
Methods for studying biological evolution and language change have influenced each other over the last 150 years. This is a technical book about how to use these methods in the study of language and culture.
Language history, language change, and language relationship: An introduction to historical and comparative linguistics
by Hans Henrich Hock and Brian Joseph
Language is always changing. Languages change in regular ways, and we can use those changes to investigate the past. This book shows how different parts of language change in different ways, and how we can use that information to figure out how languages sounded thousands of years ago.
Language change: Progress or decay?
by Jean Aitchison
Many people think that language is changing for the worse, and “young people these days” don’t speak as well as older generations. Aitchison shows what’s actually going on when languages change.
Archaeology with Words
Language is a huge source of information about past history. For example, we can use language to work out which populations have been in contact with one another (and thereby, for example, trace migrations across thousands of years with no other records). We can recover something of the settlement history of an area. For example, the place names of Connecticut clearly reveal not only that there were Native American and European settlements, but the types of settlements, which Native American groups, where the European settlers came from, amongst other things. With language we can trace the history of language family expansions, such as Algonquian in North American or Pama-Nyungan in Australia.
Yale Courses
Historical Linguistics (LING 112). Introduction to language change and language history. Types of change that a language undergoes over time: sound change, analogy, syntactic and semantic change, borrowing. Techniques for recovering earlier linguistic stages: philology, internal reconstruction, the comparative method. The role of language contact in language change. Evidence from language in prehistory. Professor: Chelsea Sanker.
Language Contact in the Ancient World (LING 103). What languages were people using in our earliest written records? How were they written? What were people talking about in these texts? This course examines the languages of the ancient near east and other civilizations that they interacted with, from Greece to Egypt. Language contact is reflected both in ancient people’s discussion of languages and use of translations, as well as in loanwords and other influences of languages on each other. Based on the written records, we also have information about other languages that were never written down, through names and other borrowed words. From the earliest tokens tracking trade commodities to epic poetry, these written records give us insights into the lives of people in the ancient world: The complaints of scribes in training, correspondences between kings, and dedications to gods. Professor: Chelsea Sanker.