SOCIOLINGUISTIC RESUME

(Change, Shift and Maintenance of Language)

Supporting Lecturer: Dr. H. Pauzan, M.Hum., M.Pd.

Arranged by:
Name : BAIQ HUSNIA HAMIDAYANI (190107097)
M. RAGIL DWIFANI AZZURA (190107070)
Class : TBI V C

ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARTMEN

FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND TEACHER TRAINING
STATE ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY OF MATARAM
2021
 CHANGE, SHIFT AND MAINTEANCE OF LANGUAGE
A. The Nature of Language change.
Languages change over time, which makes it harder to trace their history and
genealogy further back than 10,000 years. However, it is unclear whether all aspects of
language, for instance, grammar and vocabulary, change at the same rate. If not,
identifying rates of change for different linguistic features may enable us to reconstruct
language history more accurately.
In new research, Simon Greenhill and colleagues ask whether different aspects of
language evolve in different ways and at different rates. The authors apply Bayesian
phylogenetic modelling to grammatical structures and basic vocabulary items from 81
Austronesian languages to infer rates of change. Unlike previous research, they find that
grammatical structures changed much more rapidly over time than basic vocabulary. The
grammatical features the authors studied were distributed more or less evenly in three
rate-of-change categories: fast, medium and slow. Basic vocabulary items, however,
nearly all fell into the slow category. The grammatical structures that changed slowly
appeared to be consistent with earlier reports and tended to be more abstract than faster-
changing grammatical features.
This work suggests that looking at language change in a more fine-grained manner
may offer more reliable information on which to base inferences about language history
and genealogy, extending further into the past.
Language change is the phenomenon by which permanent alterations are made in the
features and the use of a language over time.
All natural languages change, and language change affects all areas of language use.
Types of language change include sound changes, lexical changes, semantic changes, and
syntactic changes.
The branch of linguistics that is expressly concerned with changes in a language (or in
languages) over time is historical linguistics (also known as diachronic linguistics).
B. Definition of Language Shift.
Language shift, also known as language transfer or language replacement or language
assimilation, is the process whereby a speech community shifts to a different language,
usually over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are perceived to be higher
status stabilise or spread at the expense of other languages that are perceived by their own
speakers to be lower-status. An example is the shift from Gaulish to Latin during the time
of the Roman Empire.
For prehistory, Forster et al. (2004) and Forster and Renfrew (2011) observe that there
is a correlation of language shift with intrusive male Y chromosomes but not necessarily
with intrusive female mtDNA. They conclude that technological innovation (the
transition from hunting-gathering to farming, or from stone to metal tools) or military
prowess (as in the abduction of British women by Vikings to Iceland) causes immigration
of at least some men, who are perceived to be of higher status than local men. Then, in
mixed-language marriages, children would speak the "higher-status" language, yielding
the language/Y-chromosome correlation seen today.
Assimilation is the process whereby a speech-community becomes bilingual and
gradually shifts allegiance to the second language. The rate of assimilation is the
percentage of the speech-community that speaks the second language more often at home.
The data are used to measure the use of a given language in the lifetime of a person, or
most often across generations. When a speech-community ceases to use their original
language, language death is said to occur.
C. The Nature of Language Maintenance.
Language maintenance denotes the continuing use of a language in the face of
competition from a regionally and socially more powerful language. Language shift is the
opposite of this: it denotes the replacement of one language by another as the primary
means of communication within a community.
The term language death is used when that community is the last one in the world to
use that language. The extinction of Cornish in England is an example of language death
as well as shift (to English). And the demise of Norwegian as an immigrant language in
the USA exemplifies shift without death, as Norwegian is of course still spoken in its
original setting in Norway.
Although languages like Latin, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit are often referred to as
dead languages, this use of the term is not common in sociolinguistics. That is because
they gradually evolved by continuous transmission from one generation to the next and
spread into regional dialects which gave rise to standardised speech forms. Latin, for
example, still ‘lives’ in modern French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian.