Language Change Revision

Attitudes towards change - Perscripitivism

-judging and correcting language

-perscripitivists try to ‘protect’ languages (and because of that come off as discrimatory against other dialects)

Attitudes towards change - Language has been changing since the dawn of time

-Modern English is extremely different in grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation to Old English

-A study done in 2017 showed that random change plays a role in grammar and form of words change, and it used verbs from 1810 onwards in American English

Attitudes towards change - New and exciting as well as important

-The podcast on emoji’s being the future of language suggests that emojis help with expressing emotions through souless texts

-new slang being invented every day

Attitudes towards change - Prejudice against young people

-hatred of new slang/words

Who/what is causing change - Young people and social media

-new slang being able to be shared and caught on quickly, language as ‘fashion’ and the prevalence of emojis

Who/what is causing change - Young women/women in general

-The podcast on young women as linguistic innovators explores how the leaders of linguistic change are young women, across the world

-children are likely to be around women and so pick up on their way of speaking and take that on

What is changing about English - new slang terms

-In 2015, a survey showed that out of 2000 parents questioned, only 10% were able to work out the meaning of ‘bae’

-”seismic age gap”

What is changing about English - using emojis in text

-provides a ‘meta-comment’ so that the other person knows how to respond

-Vyv, from the podcast on emoji's as the future of language believes that emojis are a new type of punctuation in a way

What is changing about English - New mainstream popularity of other minority English dialects

-The article “It's her personality man’s looking at” argues that there's been a recent prominence of the Multi-cultural London English of the pronoun ‘man’ as an alternative to ‘I’

-This makes the speaker feel symbolically apart of the group as ‘man’ is a plural noun

What is changing about English - Introduction of other dialects through TV

-In 2013, there was a study of why working-class Glaswegian youngsters developing London ‘Cockney’ accents and it was because of a lot of them watched TV shows like EastEnders

-kids developing accents and phrase from other countries TV shows (e.g. Bluey) → Melissa James, a speech pathologist, says that children often never keep these foreign accents as accents develop over time and from what the child hears daily (‘Dunny’ and ‘Brekky’: How Bluey is changing the way American children speak)

What is changing about English - Becoming a universal language, borrowing from other languages

-Introduction of minority groups creating their own dialects born from English and their native language