Language Change
Language change is present in all languages at all stages and is largely regular. Speakers are not always conscious of this. However, if it involves elements of an open class, like the lexicon, then speakers usually notice it and may try to prevent it by prescriptive behaviour.
• Language change is not intentional but arises from the natural variation present in language at all times, e.g. that which occurs when speakers attempt to move upwards in society or when they demonstrate solidarity with the class to which they belong.
• There may be an internal motivation for change. This is mainly the case when the change leads to paradigmatic regularity, so-called analogical change which results in more regular nominal or verbal forms.
• Speakers tend to overestimate the avoidance of homophony as a source for change and not to grasp long-term structural changes which are often connected with typological drift, the movement from one type to another over several centuries, e.g. from synthetic to analytic in the history of English.
• Change may lead to a shift in status for linguistic elements. For instance transparent words may become opaque. Full lexical words may cliticise (become temporarily attached to stems) and then appear as inflections (permanently attached). This process is known as grammaticalisation.
• At any one stage of a language there will be remnants of former changes (such as umlaut in English). These remnants often appear as suppletive forms in paradigms.
• In the past few decades sociolinguists have paid much attention to the actuation and propagation of language change. The trigger for change is difficult to make out in many cases but the propagation has been satisfactorily described in many recent studies which take social motivation to be central.
• In historical linguistics there are two main methods for gaining knowledge of earlier stages of a language: the comparative method which involves looking at forms common to two or more genetically related languages and the technique of internal reconstruction which uses information about the structure of a single language at different periods to gain knowledge about a very early stage.
• Language change is found on all levels of language, both in the past and in the present. Consult the above sections for examples from different spheres.
Language contact and language change
• Virtually every language has been in contact with one or more other languages in its history. This contact has also had some kind of an effect on the form of the language involved. Here one must distinguish between direct contact, when speakers of two or more languages intermingle, and indirect contact, when the second language is known only through the printed word or (nowadays) the non-print media. The latter type involves a language with sizeable prestige and results in cultural borrowings.
• A third type of situation can be termed delayed effect contact because the effect is only apparent some considerable time later. Such an effect is usually low-level — such as that on the level of phonetics — but may cause major changes over long periods if the morphology is affected.
• Stable contact situations may arise with bilingualism as the result. If the languages in contact are functionally distinguished then one calls the situation diglossia.
• Contact between dialects is also of importance as seen clearly in the history of English. Here many forms survive in the standard which have their origin outside of the east midland area around London which was the geographical source for early standard English.
• Languages which are contained in a geographically well delimited region can often form what is termed a linguistic area (a translation of German Sprachbund). These languages frequently come to share structural properties which diffuse throughout the area — irrespective of genetic affiliation. The standard example of such an area is the Balkans.