Discuss The Types of Language Change

a) Lexical changes
The ongoing influx of new words in the English language, for instance, helps make it
a rich field for investigation into language change, despite the difficulty of defining precisely and accurately the vocabulary available to speakers of English. Throughout its history English has not only borrowed words from other languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings.
Dictionary writers try to keep track of the changes in languages by recording the
appearance in a language of new words, or of new usages for existing words. Languages are
continually adding new words as well as dropping those that have fallen out of favour with
the users of a particular language.

b) Phonetic and Phonological Changes
The concept of sound change covers both phonetic and phonological developments.
The sociolinguist William Labov recorded the change in pronunciation in a relatively
short period in the American resort of Martha’s Vineyard and showed how this resulted from
social tensions and processes. Even in the relatively short time that broadcast media have
recorded their work, one can observe the difference between the pronunciation of the
newsreaders of the 1940s and the 1950s and the pronunciation of today. The greater
acceptance and fashionability of regional accents in media may also reflect a more
democratic, less formal society — compare the widespread adoption of language policies.
Regional accents change as well. Sound changes that affect all words in which a
particular sound occurs in a particular sound environment are called ‘regular sound changes’.
They may be conditioned or unconditioned.
The mapping and recording of small-scale phonological changes poses difficulties,
especially as the practical technology of sound recording dates only from the 19th century.
Written texts provide the main (indirect) evidence of how language sounds have changed
over the centuries. But note Ferdinand de Saussure's work on postulating the existence and
disappearance of laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European as an example of other methods of
detecting/reconstructing sound-changes within historical linguistics.
Pronunciation changes too. Sound changes that affect individual words are called
‘sporadic sound changes’.
Sometimes a change affects a sound only in particular linguistic environments.
Consider the case of ‘cats’ and ‘dogz’. This kind of regular sound change is called
‘conditioned sound change’.
When there is excessive shifting of sounds that affect every word in which a particular
sound appears, it is referred to as ‘unconditioned sound change’.

c) Spelling Changes
Standardization of spelling originated relatively recently. Differences in spelling often
catch the eye of a reader of a text from a previous century. The pre-print era had fewer literate people: languages lacked fixed systems of orthography, and the handwritten manuscripts that survive often show words spelled according to regional pronunciation and to personal
preference.

d) Semantic Changes
Semantic changes are shifts in meaning of the existing words. They include:
• Pejoration - in which a term acquires a negative association
• Amelioration - in which a term acquires a positive association
• Widening - in which a term acquires a broader meaning
• Narrowing - in which a term acquires a narrower meaning

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Titany answered the question on May 11, 2022 at 09:42