Жамият ва инновациялар –
Общество и инновации –
Society and innovations
Journal home page:
https://inscience.uz/index.php/socinov/index
The notion of language change and its nature
Gulhayo KHOLMURODOVA
1
Tashkent State University of Uzbek Language and Literature
ARTICLE INFO
ABSTRACT
Article history:
Received March 2021
Received in revised form
20 March 2021
Accepted 15 April 2021
Available online
20 May 2021
Any treatment of linguistics must address the question of
language change. The way languages change offers insights into
the nature of language itself. Language always changes and
develops either internally or externally. Internal language
change occurs as a result of the behaviour of speakers in their
everyday lives to adjust to each other, and followed by a
tendency to innovate in groups of people who are already
familiar. Then followed by other changes in sequence, ultimately
make a language different. It is grammar, phonology, phrase
sequences, and sentence with gender function. The change will
be followed by other changes. Language change may occur in any
level of a language: in pronunciation, word forms, syntax, and
word meanings.
2181-1415/© 2021 in Science LLC.
This is an open access article under the Attribution 4.0 International
(CC BY 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.ru)
Keywords:
language change,
electronic communication,
lexical change,
synchronically,
diachronically,
historical linguistics,
sociolinguistics,
evolutionary linguistics,
phonetic and phonological
changes,
syntax,
speech community.
Til o‘zgartirishi va uning tabiati tushunchasi
ANNOTATSIYA
Kalit so‘zlar:
til o‘zgarishi,
elektron aloqa,
leksik o‘zgarish,
sinxron,
diaxron,
tarixiy tilshunoslik,
sotsiolingvistika,
evolyutsion tilshunoslik,
fonetik va fonologik
o‘zgarishlar,
sintaksis,
bir tilda so‘zlashuvchi
jamiyat.
Tilshunoslikda til o‘zgarishi hodisasi asosiy ahamiyat kasb
etadi. Tillarning o‘zgarish usullari tilning tabiatiga oid
tushunchalarni qamrab oladi. Til har doim ichki yoki tashqi
ta’sirlar natijasida o‘zgaradi va rivojlanadi. Tilning ichki
o‘zgaruvi bir-biriga shu tilda so‘zlashuvchilarning bir-birini
yaxshiroq tushunishi uchun ularning kundalik hayotidagi
muloqoti natijasida sodir bo‘ladi. Va shunga o‘xshash boshqa
o‘zgarishlar natijasida til boshqacha tus oladi. Bunday
o‘zgarishlar grammatika, fonologiya,frazeologiya bo‘limlarida
yuz berishi mumkin. Bir o‘zgarish ortidan boshqa o‘zgarishlar
kelib chiqadi. Til o‘zgarishi tilning istalgan sathida yuz berishi
mumkin:
talaffuzda,
so‘z
shakllarida,
sintaksisda
va
leksikologiyada.
1
Lecturer, Tashkent State University of Uzbek Language and Literature, Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
E-mail: guli15081994@gmail.com.
Жамият ва инновациялар – Общество и инновации – Society and innovations
Special Issue – 4 (2021) / ISSN 2181-1415
834
Понятие об изменении языка и его природе
АННОТАЦИЯ
Ключевые слова:
изменение языка,
электронная
коммуникация,
лексические изменения,
синхронно,
диахронически,
историческая
лингвистика,
социолингвистика,
эволюционная
лингвистика,
фонетические и
фонологические
изменения,
синтаксис,
речевое сообщество.
Любая трактовка лингвистики должна касаться вопроса
изменения языка. То, как меняются языки, позволяет
понять природу самого языка. Язык всегда меняется и
развивается либо внутренне, либо внешне. Внутренние
языковые изменения происходят в результате поведения
говорящих в их повседневной жизни, чтобы приспособиться
друг к другу, и сопровождаются тенденцией к инновациям в
группах людей, которые уже знакомы. Затем следуют
другие изменения в последовательности, которые в
конечном итоге делают язык другим. Это грамматика,
фонология, последовательности фраз и предложения с
гендерной функцией. За этим изменением последуют
другие изменения. Языковые изменения могут происходить
на любом уровне языка: в произношении, словоформах,
синтаксисе и значениях слов.
The possible answers to why languages change tell us about the way language is
used in society, about how it is acquired by individuals and may reveal to us information
about its internal organization. (Raymond Hickey, Language Change, 2003). As all
languages are systematic, the history of any language is the history of change in its systems.
By change, we mean a permanent alteration thus slips of the tongue, ad hoc coinages that
are not adopted by other users of the language, and “new” structures that result from one
person’s getting his or her syntax tangled in an overly ambitious sentence are not regarded
as change. Neither ephemeral slang which is widely used one year but that has been
abandoned five years later can relate to the language change, it is indeed part of the history
of the language but has no permanent effect. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics:
historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistics. Some scholars use the
label corruption to suggest that language change constitutes degradation in the quality of
a language, especially when the change originates from human error or is a prescriptively
discouraged usage. Modern linguistics typically does not support this concept, since from
a scientific point of view such innovations cannot be judged in terms of good or bad.
(Kemenade, Ans van. ‘Parameters of morphosyntactic change’ 1997) John Lyons notes that
“any standard of evaluation applied to language change must be based upon recognition of
the various functions a language ‘is called upon’ to fulfill in the society which uses it”.
(Bloch B., Trager G. Outline of linguistic analysis. Baltimore: Linguistic Society of America,
1942) The belief that a language ought to be fixed; made stable and forbidden to modify
itself in any way was held by a host of scholars in the 17th and 18th centuries. They were
more familiar with the dead languages, in which the vocabulary and usage was closed, than
they were with the living languages, in which there is always incessant differentiation and
unending extension. Truly, the development of a language was firstly grounded on the
lexical changes, when the first linguists saw that the older the text is, the less its level of
comprehension. Any new epoch was accompanied by the introduction of new words which
denote new objects and phenomena. From the time of Saussure until the late 1960s, it was
assumed by the great majority of linguists that the “omnipresence of ongoing change”
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which is observable in all real-life linguistic data must be ignored in synchronic description
(apart from the possibility of allowing “free variation”; This picture has now substantially
changed, as a result of numerous careful studies of linguistic variation, most of which have
been directly or indirectly inspired by the work of William Labov. (Bailey, Charles-James N.
Variation and linguistic theory. 1976) For Saussure, language is a social institution that has
its own internal arrangement. He frequently compares the latter to a game of chess: in
language, one moves from one synchronic state to the next, as one moves only one piece at
a time on the chessboard. But, just as one move can change the whole game, and sometimes
the chess player may not even foresee all its effects, one change in language may have a
repercussion throughout the whole system. However, “each move is absolutely distinct
from the preceding and the subsequent equilibrium”, whichever way a state in the game
has been reached is irrelevant, and someone looking at the chessboard at that very
moment can assess the situation without having to know what happened just seconds
before. He constantly points out that any individual creation in language is doomed unless
it is taken over by the speech community, at which time the individual loses all control over
it. Thus, “a language never exists apart from the social fact”, (Saussure, de Ferdinand.
Course in General Linguistics, 1996) and while society insures its continuity, language is,
like all social institutions, subject to change in time. Saussure states explicitly that “each
change is launched by a certain number of individuals before it is accepted for general use”,
(Saussure. De Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics, 1996) but not all innovations
receive this recognition. As long as they remain individual, the linguist may safely ignore
them, since they only actually enter his field of investigation after adoption by the whole
community.
In the 21st century, electronic and wireless communication has changed the way we
sometimes represent words in writing. For example, in SMS language (text messaging), the
sentence “I have a question for you” is “?4u”. Some scholars use the label corruption to
suggest that language change constitutes degradation in the quality of a language,
especially when the change originates from human error or is a prescriptively discouraged
usage. Modern linguistics typically does not support this concept, since from a scientific
point of view such innovations cannot be judged in terms of good or bad. John Lyons notes
that "any standard of evaluation applied to language-change must be based upon
recognition of the various functions a language ‘is called upon’ to fulfill in the society which
uses it". In 1785, a few years after the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s ‘The History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ had been published, the poet and philosopher James
Beattie declared: “Our language (I mean the English) is degenerating very fast”. The desire
to stop language change and looking to the past to find models of unchanging language, has
led to the notion of correct and incorrect language. Correct usage is that which is
supposedly immutable – cast in iron with explicit rules, and which is somewhat old-
fashioned. Incorrect usage, by contrast, is fluid, decadent, without any rules and socially
undesirable. For an objective examination of language change such views are spurious.
They have more to do with people who use language and our attitudes towards them than
with language itself which is of course neutral. One can get use to an item of change, no
matter how unpleasant one may regard it initially. In general, one can say that the first
time one hears something, it is strange, the second time a little unusual, the third time it is
perfectly normal.
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Language change may occur in any level of a language: in pronunciation, word forms,
syntax, and word meanings (semantic change). The extent to which speakers are aware of
it depends on the level. (Campbell L. The History of Linguistics, 2002) As might be
expected, change which involves a closed class of segments is not as conscious for speakers
as change which takes place within an open class. The prime example for the latter type of
change is lexical change. Vocabulary items and phrases introduced in literature enter the
spoken language. The written tradition tends to give rise to concepts of correctness and to
act as a conservative influence on the spoken language. It is important to note that change
is not a goal of speakers of a language. Rather it is what is called an ‘epiphenomenon’. By
this is meant that re-arrangement in language occurs for internal or external reasons – or
a combination of both, which is discussed in the next chapter of our work. Language
changes across space and across social groups, and it also varies across time. Generation
by generation, pronunciations evolve, new words are borrowed or invented, the meaning
of old words drifts, and morphology develops or decays. The rate of change varies, but
whether the changes are faster or slower, they build up until the “mother tongue” becomes
arbitrarily distant and different. After a thousand years, the original and new languages
will not be mutually intelligible. In the modern world, language change is often socially
problematic. Long before divergent dialects lose mutual intelligibility completely, they
begin to show difficulties and inefficiencies in communication, especially under noisy or
stressful conditions. (Mc Mahon A. Understanding language change, 1994) Although it is
claimed that the processes and the causes of linguistic change can never be understood by
looking at old documents or by reconstructing proto-languages, but only by observing
ongoing change, linguists working within this framework are developing descriptive
models which can be applied both synchronically and diachronically – thus breaking
another Saussurean taboo. (Aitchison, Jean. Language change: Progress or decay? 3rd
edition 2001) Bailey, for example, claiming that “the function of time in defining
synchronic language patterns cannot be ignored in valid descriptions of language proposes
the development of “dynamic or time-based models” which will be “suitable for either
historical or descriptive analysis” (Bailey, Charles-James N. Variation and linguistic theory.
Washington D.C. Center for Applied Linguistics) The explanation uncontroversial among
evolutionists is as follows: in languages there is an amount of variation, and variants are
selected in speakers’ usage. A particular variant may be selected increasingly often such
that other competing variants possibly die out. Change therefore is an unintended by-
product of many individual choices among available variants and speakers don’t select
variants in order to change their languages, but because they want to communicate
successfully. The empirical consequences of the evolutionary scenario can be summarized
as follows: The locus of change is language use rather than (incomplete) language
acquisition (Millward M.A, Biography of the English Language 3rd Edition, 2012)
All languages change continuously, and do so in many and varied ways. Marcel
Cohen details various types of language change under the overall headings of the external
evolution and internal evolution of languages. The ongoing influx of new words into the
English language 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, whilst losing some old
words. (Milroy J. Linguistic variation and change, 1992) Lexicographers try to keep track
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of the changes in languages by recording and dating the appearance in a language of new
words, or of new usages for existing words. By the same token, they may tag some words
eventually as “archaic” or “obsolete”. For example, in the English language, there occurred
a shift from common words (e.g. house) towards the use of rarer words (e.g. building), but
on a marginal level. Within over 300 years, the relative frequency of words in samples of
English and American newspapers decreased only about three units within a possible
theoretical range of 208 units that is 1-2%. (Millward M.A Biography of the English
Language 3rd Edition 2012, Wadsworth, Cengage learning. 1996)
Standardization of spelling originated centuries ago. 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. As a rule, if there are extensive ongoing changes in one
subsystem of a language, other subsystems tend to remain fairly stable. For example, over
the centuries, an uncurbed change would lead to a total breakdown in communication.
Changes in the graphic system of a language come much more slowly than changes in other
systems. English has not adopted a totally new grapheme (though a few have been lost and
the distribution of others has been modified) since it began to be written in the Latin
alphabet. Despite vast changes in pronunciation, English spelling has not been revised in
any fundamental way for the past five hundred years, until the electronic age. However,
electronic media, such as email, blogging, computer games, and cell phones, have caused
drastic changes in spellings. Abbreviations and accepted misspellings abound. And now we
use emoticons for whole sentences. The emoticon
☺
means “I am happy”. This can also
be done with a computer keyboard. The symbol “;)” means “I am smiling and winking at
you”. (Lamy, Hampel Online Communication, 2007) There are multiple reasons for this
relative conservatism of writing systems, most of them external to language itself. First,
although speech is ephemeral, writing provides a permanent reference; we can go back to
check what was written. Digital texts survive even longer than printed ones. We can save
computer files and emails forever. In some ways, though, writing has also become less
permanent. Digital files can be “eaten” by an untrustworthy computer.
REFERENCES:
1.
Bloch B., Trager G. Outline of linguistic analysis. Baltimore: Linguistic Society of
America, 1942.
2.
Kemenade, Ans van. ‘Parameters of morphosyntactic change’ 1997.
3.
Labov W. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 1 Internal Factors. 1999.
4.
Lamy, Hampel Online Communication, 2007.
5.
Lanham, Richard A. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts.
Chicago: 1993.
6.
Raymond Hickey, Language Change, 2003.
7.
Saussure, de Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics, 1996.
8.
Millward M.A Biography of the English Language 3rd Edition 2012, Wadsworth,
Cengage learning. 1996.
