LANGUAGE CHANGE

Quirrk

Referred to WE as a ‘liberation linguistics’ in the 90s

* seen as a bad thing

Achebe

English can ‘carry the weight of my African experience’ yet it will have to be different to suit it’s new surroundings

* like Schneider

Tupas

Some Englishes are more equal than others

Smith

‘English belongs to the world… it is yours (no matter who you are) as much as it is mine (no matter who i am)… it belongs to all of us’

Widdowson

‘The very fact that English is an international language means that no nation can have custody over it’

David Crystal: Tidal Flow (1999)

* No predictable direction for changes in langauge
* If you try to stop language change, you are trying to stop social change. It would be easier to stop the tide coming in.
* The future of speech is one of increasing variety/diversity and thus change. The sooner people are prepared to cope with a newer, diverse world (e.g. swimming with the tide, not against it), the better
* Language change is most commonly seen in a spoken lang.

Jonathan Swift (18th century)

* Argued in 1721 that an academy should be formed to regulate language use. Fixed grammar of Latin was admired.
* Failed to figure out what actually constitues ‘English’. It had rules to prevent breakdowns/aid communcation.
* Swift’s academy based on ‘académie française’ which had been regulating French since 1634. His proposal came to nothing.

Norman Tebbit (1980s)

Allowing standards of english to slip means there is no imperative to stay out of crime.

* Concerns are to do with taste and good manners
* Language rules are being invented as a social ideology
* Complains not about failure to communicate but a failure to communicate in a certain way e.g. ‘lazy’ speech of the younger gen.

Jean Aitchinson: Crumbling Castle

English needs to be protected. Suggestion that language use has passed the peak and is in decay.

Jean Aitchinson: The Damp Spoon

Sloppiness and laziness cause language change. E.g. glottal stops.

* Idea of superior english

Jean Aitchinson: Infectious Disease

‘Poor’ or ‘bad’ language is caught like a disease and should be fought off.

Criticisms of Jean Aitchinson

* When was the ‘golden’ era of the perfect language, the castle?
* Language is in constant flux
* Many examples of language change occurring has happened for a deliberate reason, not just ‘laziness’.

Robert Loweth (1762)

* Introduced the first grammar book of English Language: ‘a short introduction to English Grammar’
* Feared the popular usage of English (i.e. church) would lead to decline.
* Rules included:
* No double/multiple negatives
* No splitting infinitives
* No ‘they’ as a gender neutral pronoun
* No preposition at the end of a sentence

Deborah Cameron

There is a moral and politicos strand to prescriptive thinking.

* language as a ‘proxy battleground’ for wider social and cultural concerns’
* Grammar is the tool to wage the war due to the metaphorical association with order/hierarchy etc.

Snell and Cushing: Research in Leeds and London

Nonstandard grammar was infrequent in the writing of Years 5/6 pupils (lang rate of 1 per 1000 words).

* some forms that are routinely corrected in children’s speech did not appear in writing (E.g. ‘ain’t’)

Snell and Cushing: Ofsted reports

Schools judged as more successful when students were reminded of standard English forms and presented with a list of banned words.

* worse schools have pupils with a ‘poor command of standard english’, a restricted vocabulary (seen as the ‘main barrier’)
* Use of standard english associated with higher ability
* People with non-standardised accents/dialects are seen as ‘less able’ or ‘lacking in clarity’

Ofsted need to ‘change the way it listens’ as the issues aren’t the language being used, rather **who is speaking.**

Casper Grathnol

* President of Oxford Dictionaries
* Pictographic script emoji stepped in to fulfil demands of 21st century communication

Daily Mail on emoji

* ‘Degradation of our language continues’
* ‘\[CMC is\] a crutch for a generation’
* ‘little cartoons for illiterate (adult) children’

Otto Jespersen

‘The GVS consists of a general raising of all long vowels’

* Some linguists disagree and think that GVS may have begun earlier

Sapir Whorff

The way you view the world is predetermined by the language you use

* E.g. how sexist language inherently influences the way we view men/women
* Controversial: says that we don’t have free thought

David Crystal

* it can be argued that GVS operated in more than one stage with different impact rates on different parts of the country.