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Why do languages change?
John McWhorter
Why is our English diff erent from Shakespeare’s? What can English spelling tell us about language change?
What kinds of changes do languages undergo? Can we stop English from changing?
Have you ever left a Shakespeare performance feeling worn out from trying to understand what the characters were saying? It wasn’t just because Shakespeare’s English is poetic, but because the English that Shakespeare knew was, in many ways, a diff erent language from ours. When Juliet asked ‘Wherefore art thou Romeo?’ she wasn’t asking where Romeo was—aft er all, he’s right there under the balcony! Wherefore meant why. But we no longer have that word because languages shed words all the time. And they also take on new ones, like blog.
Languages are always changing. It’s as inevitable for them to change as it is for cloud patterns in the sky to take on new forms.
If we see a camel in the clouds today and walk outside and see the same camel tomorrow, then something’s very wrong. It’s the same
way with languages—every language is in the process of changing into a new one.
In English, you can see this easily because our spelling oft en preserves the way the language was pronounced seven hundred years ago. Th e word name, for instance, used to be pronounced
‘NAH-muh.’ But we stopped saying the fi nal /e/ and the AH sound (NAHme) drift ed into an AY sound (NAYm).
Pronunciation is not the only area of impermanence: grammar changes, too. English used to be a language where verbs at the end of the sentence came. Th at is, a thousand or so years ago that’s how you would have said that last sentence, with ‘came’ at the end. We also used to have more pronouns. You was only used to mean ‘y’all’;
for talking to an individual person, the word used was thou. And for the ‘generic’ you—as in a sentence like ‘You only live once’—the pronoun was man. Now we just use you for all those meanings.
Th is kind of change is why we face the task of learning foreign languages. If language didn’t change, we’d still all speak the fi rst language that popped up in Africa when humans fi rst started to talk. But once the original band of people split off into separate groups, the language took on new forms in each new place—dif-ferent sounds, diff erent word order, diff erent endings. Th e result was that Chinese has tones; some Australian languages have only three verbs; some African languages have click sounds; many Native American languages pack a huge amount of information into single words; and English uses the same word you whether one or two or many people are involved.
Th e only thing that makes it look as if a language stays the same forever is print, because print does stay the same way forever. We think of Latin as a dead language, because we see it written on the page and we know that the particular language captured on that page is not spoken by anybody any more. But technically, the Latin we struggle with in classrooms was just one stage in a language that never died. It just drift ed into several new versions of itself like French, Spanish, and Italian. We don’t think of the language of the
Why do languages change? 35
opera Don Giovanni as ‘street Latin’—it’s a new language altogether.
Th ere was never a day when people in Italy woke up and proclaimed
‘We were speaking Latin last night but today we’re speaking Italian!’
Latin just morphed along like cloud formations, which might look like a camel one day and like a weasel the next.
But within our lifespans, it’s hard not to think of changes in our language as mistakes. Th ere was a time, fi ft een or twenty centuries ago, when Latin was the offi cial language of the territory we now call France. Th e bureaucrats and scholars who lived there and spoke it heard the beginnings of French around them but to them it sounded like just Grade-F Latin, not like a new language in its own right. Gray zones are always tricky. So, when young people say things like ‘She’s all “don’t talk to me like that” and I was like “you shoulda known anyway” ’, they’re pushing the language on its way to new frontiers.
It was through the exact same kinds of changes that English got from Beowulf to Tom Wolfe.
About the author
John McWhorter, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, earned his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993 and became As-sociate Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, aft er teaching at Cornell University. His academic specialty is language change and language contact. He is the author of Th e Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (Perennial, 2003), an account of how the world’s languages arise, change, and mix; and Doing Our Own Th ing: Th e Degradation of Language and Music in America and Why We Should, Like, Care (Gotham, 2003). He has also written a book on dialects and Black English, Th e Word on the Street (Plenum, 1998), and two books on Creole languages: Th e Missing Spanish Creoles (California, 2000) and Defi ning Creole (Oxford, 2005). Dr. McWhorter has appeared oft en on radio and television programs such as Dateline NBC, Good Morning, America, Th e Jim Lehrer Newshour, and Fresh Air, and he does regular commentaries for National Public Radio’s All Th ings Considered. E-mail:
Suggestions for further reading
In this book: Th e origins and history of languages are also discussed in chapters 4 (earliest languages), 5 (language relationships), 6 (the lan-guage of Adam and Eve), 8 (pidgins and creoles), 48 (origins of English), and 54 (Icelandic); other chapters specifi cally focusing on language change include 11 (grammar), 41 (dialect change), 50 (Latin), and 51 (Italian).
Elsewhere:
McWhorter, John. Th e Power of Babel (Perennial, 2003). A book-length survey of how one original language became fi ve thousand, with dis-cussion of what dialects and creoles are and why writing slows down language change.
Bryson, Bill. Th e Mother Tongue (Morrow, 1990). A great way to get a handle on how English became what it is aft er starting as a close relative of German that is now a foreign tongue to English speakers; witty and goes down easy.
Ostler, Nicholas. Empires of the Word (HarperCollins, 2005). A chronicle of the birth, spread and sometimes decline of languages of empire like English, Arabic, and Sanskrit, lending a nice sense of how language change is natural and eternal.