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In isolated subpopulations speaking the same language, most changes will not be
shared. As a result, such subgroups will drift apart linguistically, and eventually will not
be able to understand one another.
In the modern world, language change is often socially problematic. Long before
divergent dialects lose mutual intelligibility completely, they begin to show difficulties
and inefficiencies in communication, especially under noisy or stressful conditions. Also,
as people observe language change, they usually react negatively, feeling that the
language has "gone downhill". You never seem to hear older people commenting that the
language of their children or grandchildren's generation has improved compared to the
language of their own youth.
There are many different routes to language change. Changes can take originate in
language learning, or through language contact, social differentiation, and natural
processes in usage.
Language contact: Migration, conquest and trade bring speakers of one language
into contact with speakers of another language. Some individuals will become fully
bilingual as children, while others learn a second language more or less well as adults. In
such contact situations, languages often borrow words, sounds, constructions and so on.
1- From group to group: changes spread like waves in different directions, and social
factors such as age, gender, status, and social group affect the rates and directions
of change.
2- From style to style: from more formal to more casual, from one individual to
another, from one social group to another, and from one word to another.
3- Lexical diffusion: the change from one word's vowel to another, the sound change
begins in one word and later on in another, etc.
a. Social status
b. Sex
c. Interaction
On the other hand, a lot of studies suggest that there are two reasons; internal and
external. The internal reasons are referred to as the causes of the nature of language itself
while the external reasons are referred to as the situations found in the society using the
language that triggers the change.
Internal reason
Example of internal reason: the change from the sound of /ng/found in the words
such as reading, going, seeing (Standard English Variety) into /n/ (non-Standard English
Variety).
Types of Change
Sound change
All aspects of language change and a great deal is known about general
mechanisms and historical details of changes at all levels of linguistic analysis. However,
a special and conspicuous success has been achieved in modeling changes in
phonological systems, traditionally called sound change. In the cases where we have
access to several historical stages -- for instance, the development of the modern
Romance Languages from Latin -- these sound changes are remarkably regular.
Techniques developed in such cases permit us to reconstruct the sound system -- and
some of the vocabulary -- of unattested parent languages from information about
daughter languages.
In some cases, an old sound becomes a new sound across the board. Such a change
occurred in Hawai'ian, in that all the "t" sounds in an older form of the language became
"k"s: at the time Europeans encountered Hawai'ian, there were no "t"s in it at all, though
the closely related languages Tahitian, Samoan, Tongan and Maori all have "t"s.
Assimilation, or the influence of one sound on an adjacent sound, is perhaps the most
pervasive process. Assimilation processes changed Latin /k/ when followed by /i/
or /y/, first to /ky/, then to "ch", then to /s/, so that Latin faciat /fakiat/ 'would make'
became fasse /fas/ in Modern French (the subjunctive of the verb faire 'to
make').Palatalization is a kind of assimilation.
Splits are rarer than mergers, and usually arise when a formerly conditioned
alternation loses the environment that provided the original conditioning, and the
previously conditioned alternation becomes two independent sounds that contrast with
each other. This is basically what happened when /f/ and /v/ split in English
(/v/ having previously been an alternate of /f/ when /f/ occurred in an intervocalic
position).
Loss involves the loss of a sound from a language, as when Hawai'ian lost the /t/ in
favor of /k/ (see below).
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