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Reasons and Causes of Language Change

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a) Economy: Speakers tend to make their utterances as efficient and effective as
possible to reach communicative goals. Purposeful speaking therefore involves a
trade-off of costs and benefits.
b) The principle of least effort - Speakers especially use economy in their articulation,
which tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms. See vowel reduction,
cluster reduction, lenition, and elision. After some time a change may become widely
accepted (it becomes a regular sound change) and may end up treated as a standard.
For instance: going to ['go?.??.t?] ? gonna ['g?n?] or ['g?n?], with examples of bothvowel
reduction [?] ? [?] and elision [nt] ? [n], [o?.?] ? [?].
c) Analogy: reducing word forms by likening different forms of the word to the root.
d) Language contact: borrowing of words and constructions from foreign languages.
e) The medium of communication - spoken language differs from written language
f) Cultural environment: Groups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and
objects in their language, whether they encounter different people there or not.

Titany answered the question on May 11, 2022 at 09:40

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Reasons and Causes of Language Change

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