The universality of language change
Human language would presumably function much better as a medium of communication if it did not change over time, because dialects would not diverge and mutually unintelligible languages would not multiply (see Chapter 10). But that is not what we find; on the contrary, any language or dialect recorded for even a few centuries can be shown to have changed over the course of its recorded history, and in recent decades William Labov and his students and colleagues in sociolinguistics have uncovered evidence of change in progress in practically every speech community in which they have looked for it. Apparently language change is universal. That is all the more surprising because in modern literate societies there are institutional forces (such as schools and newspaper columnists) that militate against linguistic change – and invariably fail. One nat-urally wonders why, but that question is not fundamental enough; we need to ask
“how” before we can ask “why.” Let us begin by looking at the mechanics of change: how specific language changes originate, and what happens to them over time. (See already Paul1960: 18–20, 24–5, 32–4 – originally written in 1880 and last revised in 1920!)
Potential sources of language change
A linguistic change has occurred when an innovation has spread and become accepted in a speech community. If we want to understand the entire course of the change, we first need to ask where the innovation came from.
The most obvious source of linguistic innovations is contact with speakers of other languages. Any speaker of English is aware that we adopt and use foreign words to talk about foreign things; fairly recent examples include sushi, duma, ulema, Taliban, and so on. Contact with other dialects of the same language leads to similar “borrowings”; for instance, a speaker of North American English is most likely to have learned the word devolution from British discussions of British politics. These are all examples of the borrowing of “words” – that is, of listed items, as opposed to rules or structures – from other languages or dialects.
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Why the source of any particular change is elusive 29
The extent to which structure can also be borrowed from significantly different dialects or foreign languages is the subject of ongoing debate. We will examine the linguistic consequences of contact with other languages inChapter 4and the consequences of contact with mutually intelligible dialects inChapter 3.
An almost equally obvious source of innovations is deliberate manipulation of one’s language; the coining of new words, including brand names, is a familiar example. This resembles borrowing from foreign languages in two ways: adult native speakers are typically responsible for such changes, and while it is clear that conscious manipulation can give rise to new words, it is not clear that it can affect language structure. For instance, American advertisers’ coining of Uncola as a description of the soft drink 7-up, with un- prefixed to a noun in defiance of normal derivational rules, did not lead to the widespread use of un- in similar functions; its only linguistic effect was to prompt Volkswagen to describe its
“beetle” as the uncar for a short time.
A much less obvious source of innovations follows from the nature of human language (as discussed in the preceding chapter) and its transmission from gener-ation to genergener-ation. Though the ability to learn a language is innate, each specific language must be learned. It seems likely that errors made in learning a native lan-guage might occasionally persist into adulthood and eventually spread in a speech community; presently they would cease to be regarded as errors, and a linguistic change would have occurred. In the generative tradition this has become a com-mon hypothesis for the source of structural change (see e.g. Halle1962: 64–5).
Finally, there is a potential source of innovations that involves both language contact and learner errors. Individuals who come to live in a community whose dominant language or dialect is not their own usually find it necessary to learn the dominant language or dialect, but if they must learn it as adults they almost always do so imperfectly – that is, they make errors which they are chronically unable to correct. It seems possible that, at least in exceptional circumstances, those errors might ultimately be a source of language change in the community at large.
An optimist might suppose that once we have figured out what the potential sources of innovations are, we need only go find examples. Unfortunately reality is not so accommodating.
Why the source of any particular change is elusive There are at least two practical problems which severely limit our ability to identify the source of any particular change.
In the first place, records of the past are of almost no use in attempting to find the sources of linguistic change; they often show what changes occurred over a given time period, but they hardly ever provide any evidence for how they occurred or how they started. This is part of a larger problem. Almost all linguistic records from before the twentieth century are impoverished in a wide variety of ways:
in most cases we have limited information about the phonetics of the language;
the surface contrasts of the phonology are sometimes imperfectly recorded; rare inflectional categories and syntactic constructions may not be adequately attested if the corpus is small; words for some concepts may fail to appear by chance.
Still worse, the variation that is normal in the speech of any community is almost always poorly represented in documents of the past. From most times and places only “officially approved” dialects and styles are represented; even when that is not the case (as in the Middle English period), a large proportion of the variation is excluded from the record by sheer chance because writing in the language was sporadic, or much of what was written fails to survive, or both. Finally, no one thought normal language acquisition interesting enough to record it in any detail before the twentieth century, and without records of acquisition we of course have no record of learner errors. Under the circumstances, the odds that we might be able to pinpoint the source of a particular linguistic change of the past are almost always nil.
A simple example will illustrate the problem. In all dialects of Old English (OE; i.e. English before the Norman Conquest) the 3sg. and all the forms of the plural ended in -þ (pronounced [-q]) in the present indicative of most verbs. In late tenth-century interlinear glosses written in the Northumbrian dialect we begin to find -s occasionally instead, and in the northern dialects of Middle English (ME) -s has become the normal ending. No language with which OE was in contact had such a verb ending, so it is difficult to see how it could have been borrowed into the language. The change does not seem to be a regular sound change (on which seeChapter 5), because word-final -þ in general was not affected; for instance, Northumbrian OE m¯onaþ ‘month’ and ˙gigoþ ‘youth’ never appear with final -s, and their northern ME descendants m¯oneth andʒouth likewise preserve the final consonant unchanged. Is it then a learner error? But what sort of error, and how could learners fail to learn such common and basic inflectional endings? The documents do not provide us with enough information to answer those questions.
Historical linguists have long known how we must try to compensate for the impoverishment of our records of the past. So long as human biology and the con-ditions of language acquisition and daily use have not changed (and they clearly have not for tens of millennia), we must assume that human language is a single phenomenon, exhibiting always and everywhere the same general characteristics, organization, and structures; that allows us to interpret the fragmentary records of the past in the light of our much fuller knowledge of the present, using the uniformitarian principle (UP) in much the same way that historical geologists and palaeontologists do (see Osthoff and Brugmann1878, Labov1972: 101). As it applies to linguistics, the UP can be stated as follows:
Unless we can demonstrate a relevant alteration in the conditions of language use or language acquisition between some time in the past and the present, we must assume that the same types, range, and distribution of language structures existed and the same types of linguistic change processes operated at that past time as in the present.
Why the source of any particular change is elusive 31
(For instance, we expect all human languages of the past to have organized their sounds as contrastive phonemes; we do not expect there to have been any phonemes outside the attested modern range of speech sounds; we expect sounds that are very common cross-linguistically now to have been so in the recoverable past; and we expect sound changes of the past to have been of the same types we can observe today.) In other words, we must interpret the records of linguistic change in the past in the light of what we can discover about the linguistic changes going on around us now. The present must help us to explain the past – not the other way round. In fact we have no practical alternative: if we can’t assume that ancient languages functioned and changed like modern ones, we have no way of knowing how they functioned and changed, and we’re reduced to sheer speculation.
So we principally want to study the origins of current linguistic changes. But any serious attempt to do so will soon encounter the second practical problem.
It is very likely that most changes begin their long careers as idiosyncracies in a single individual’s speech, or perhaps in the speech of several individuals who by chance innovate in the same way; discovering the origins of the changes will mean discovering how those individuals came to use the linguistic peculiarity in question. But the odds that any particular individual’s idiosyncracies will be observed by even the most zealous sociolinguist are, once again, virtually nil.
Constraints on time and funding do not permit the sampling of more than a few score individuals’ speech, and even in a speech community as small as 10,000 people that is a woefully inadequate sample if our goal is to find potential language changes. Much larger samples of variation can be culled very cheaply from the internet (as an anonymous reviewer observes), but most of the information about individual speakers that is crucial for a sociolinguistic analysis of the progress of a change is absent from internet postings. Telephone interviews, which were used in compiling Labov et al. 2006, are another inexpensive alternative, but neither alternative will be of much help in trying to pin down the origins of innovations that give rise to linguistic changes. More importantly, even if innovations were observed they could not be identified as future linguistic changes with any probability of success; after all, most quirks of a particular individual’s speech do not survive the individual’s death because they are not imitated by other speakers. We are constrained to search instead for potential language changes that are used by a very small subcommunity within which they presumably originated – and even they are overwhelmingly likely to be overlooked.
In some cases that doesn’t matter: we don’t care which speakers of English first began to use sushi, because it’s obvious that the word was borrowed from Japanese and the historical and cultural circumstances in which it was borrowed are well documented. But as usual, those are the trivial cases; vocabulary items come and go without materially affecting a language’s structure. The moment we look at a really interesting case we run head-on into the evidential prob-lem. The “positive anymore” of American English is a case in point. In most dialects of English (including most dialects of American English) anymore is a negative polarity item, used only in negative and interrogative clauses; one can say
(1) I don’t drink so much coffee anymore.
and
(2) Does he even show up anymore?
but not
(3) *I used to think that show was boring, but anymore I kind of like it.
But in North America there are also “positive anymore” dialects in which the third example is grammatical. That is clearly an innovation, but it is not clear how it happened. The phenomenon did not even begin to be reported until it was fairly widespread; by that point children were learning the construction natively, and one could no longer be certain that any given individual had not learned it natively (e.g. from schoolmates at an early age). Since the word itself is native, borrowing is not in question; but how could a change in the usage of a contextually restricted item have started? It is much too late to discover the answer by direct investigation.
For these reasons we are constrained to infer the origins not only of all linguistic changes of the past, but also of all or most of the changes in progress that we can still observe. If our inferences are to be any better than guesswork, we need to construct them in the context of a fully detailed, realistic model of how languages continue to exist through time. As we will see, knowledge of how languages are perpetuated will allow us to make some surprisingly solid inferences about the sources of linguistic change.
The cycle of language replication
A language continues to exist only so long as it is used by a community of native speakers; thus the survival of any language depends on the replication of its native speech community. (A spoken language with no native speakers, such as medieval Latin, though not exactly “dead,” is not fully alive either; in particular, its structures are influenced by the native languages of those who speak it, so that it no longer has a fully autonomous existence.) Speech communities replicate themselves one speaker at a time, by the process of native language acquisition (NLA). Several of the unique properties of NLA are crucial for our understanding of language change.
NLA is developmentally driven. Children growing up in a community of human language users – that is, all normal children – acquire the language or languages that they hear around them, without any conscious teaching (and sometimes in spite of attempts to teach them). There is ample evidence that they do not learn by simple imitation; rather, they construct subconscious grammars on the basis of the speech that they hear around them. At first their grammars are very unlike adult grammars and yield obviously anomalous outputs, but over time they gradually
The cycle of language replication 33
bring their internal grammars into conformity with the adult grammars around them until they are more or less indistinguishable from other native speakers of the language.
By contrast, millions of human beings have discovered that when they leave childhood behind they are unable to learn further languages well enough to pass as native speakers; the almost universal inability of adults to learn further languages well is a basic fact of research on second-language acquisition (see e.g. Schachter 1996: 159–61). Of course some do much better than others; a few appear to be able to learn languages perfectly as adults. But it is commonplace to find that when such second-language speakers are under stress their control of the non-native language slips, and phonetic and grammatical features of their native language begin to show through the fac¸ade of perfect competence. Examples come readily to memory. One of the authors is acquainted with a colleague born and raised in Russia who usually appears to speak American English perfectly even though it is his fourth language, learned when he was already an adult; but on two occasions when he was under considerable stress his ordinarily perfect English phonology was observed to deteriorate, and he began to palatalize English consonants before front vowels heavily, as though speaking Russian. A former academic adviser of the same author once observed that, though she had used English as her primary language for years, when she was tired the inanimate objects in the room began to acquire the genders of her native Italian, the bed becoming “he,” the lamp “she,”
and so on. It seems clear that the grammar of a language learned in adulthood is actually overlaid on the grammar of one’s native language.
A pattern of behavior which appears to be universal demands a universally applicable explanation. Most linguists accept the hypothesis that a native lan-guage must be acquired within a “critical period” which is developmentally defined (Lenneberg1967: 142, 153, 178–9). Why that is so is not clear, since the physiological development which causes the “window of opportunity” to close has not been identified and the results of attempts to find neurological differences in the processing of native and non-native languages are difficult to interpret (see e.g. the discussion of Bhatia and Ritchie1999: 579–80). But regardless of the cognitive mechanisms involved, some version of the critical period hypothesis must be correct. Experimental evidence shows that the ability of children to acquire second languages natively begins to decline slightly at the age of about 8 to 10, then declines much more dramatically around the age of puberty (see the careful discussion of Johnson and Newport1989with references). The crit-ical period hypothesis is also strongly supported by observed differences in the recovery of patients from traumatic aphasia: patients whose brains were damaged in childhood usually recover their full capacity for language, whereas damaged adults do not (see the detailed discussion of Lenneberg1967: 142–50).
Children who are exposed to more than one language during the NLA devel-opmental window do not acquire “mixed” languages; though there may be some confusion to start with, the children invariably sort it out, eventually becoming native speakers of all the languages that they have occasion to use on a regular
basis (Fantini1985, Meisel1989, Bhatia and Ritchie1999: 574–5). At least four languages can be acquired natively by a single child; there is probably no inher-ent limit to how many a child can acquire, though the finite length of the critical period must impose a practical limit (see e.g. Meisel1989with references). One of the languages is usually “dominant,” in the sense that the multilingual uses it more often, or preferentially, or in a wider range of social situations.† But though bi- or multilingual speakers are seldom “perfectly balanced,” it would be misleading to insist that only one of their languages can be native; the evidence shows that “early bilinguals are remarkably close to two monolinguals in terms of the development of formal features and mechanisms of language acquisition (i.e., in the development of phonology and syntax . . . )” (Bhatia and Ritchie1999:
572–3). Since native bilingualism is a type of language contact, we will consider its consequences for language change inChapter 4.
Let us take a closer look at exactly what is learned in NLA and what aspects of language are normally learned later in life.
Children invariably acquire the inflectional system(s) of their native
Children invariably acquire the inflectional system(s) of their native