Language change, dialect and accent

Types of change: could be both conscious and unconscious

1. Jean Aitcheson states that Language change is due to how the mind works, stating that there is arepressures from above which are conscious changes which means that individuals know that they arechanging their language e.g. (Change in pronunciation). Examples of the conscious change are that upper middle class New   Yorkers inserted the ‘r’ in wordssuch as ‘bear’ and ‘beard’. This is   known as the ‘r-insertion’ and was seen to be socially prestigious.
2. Pressures from below are seen as unconscious changes where individuals subconscious are changingtheir language meaning they are not aware of their own actions. Example: Eventually, the lower middle class people started to use the   ‘r-insertion’ in their everyday speech tofeel more socially accepted as   they subconsciously felt they had weak social status.

Language change: random fluctuation theory (random fluctuation theory was supported by 2 linguists).

1. Paul Postal said that language is as unpredictable as fashion and therefore changes in language are totally random.
2. Charles Hockett proposed a different angle, that random leads to language changing.

Language change: Substratum theory. Substratum theory explains changes in language coming about through language contact. In the past this happened mainly through trade and invasion. Nowadays it might happen through social networking and immigration.

Linguistic reconstruction is the practice of establishing the features of an unattested ancestor language of one or more given languages.

There are two kinds of reconstruction:

1. Internal reconstruction uses irregularities in a single language to make inferences about an earlier stage of that language – that is, it is based on evidence from that language alone.
2. Comparative reconstruction, usually referred to just as reconstruction, establishes features of the ancestor of two or more related languages, belonging to the same language family, by means of the comparative method. A language reconstructed in this way is often referred to as a proto-language (the common ancestor of all the languages in a given family); examples include Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Dravidian, etc.

Comparative method

In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyses the internal development of a single language over time.

There are other branches of linguistics that involve comparing languages:

• Linguistic typology compares languages to classify them by their features. Its ultimate aim is to understand the universals that govern language, and the range of types found in the world’s languages in respect of any particular feature (word order or vowel system, for example).
• Contact linguistics examines the linguistic results of contact between the speakers of different languages, particularly as evidenced in loan words. An empirical study of loans is by definition historical in focus and therefore forms part of the subject matter of historical linguistics. One of the goals of etymology is to establish which items in a language’s vocabulary result from linguistic contact. This is also an important issue both for the comparative method and for the lexical comparison methods, since failure to recognize a loan may distort the findings.
• Contrastive linguistics compares languages usually with the aim of assisting language learning by identifying important differences between the learner’s native and target languages. Contrastive linguistics deals solely with present-day languages.

The comparative method is also important

• for language classification, for research on distant genetic relationships between languages and for other areas.
• Languages which belong to the same language family are genetically related to one another.
• This means that they are derived from a single original language.

The aim of the comparative method

• The aim of the comparative method is to recover the ancestor language (the proto- language).
• It is done by doing a comparison of the descendant languages.
• Another aim is to determine what changes have taken place in the various languages that developed from the proto- language.

Accent & dialect

Accent is the description of aspects of pronunciation which identify where an individual speker is from, socially or regionally.

Dialect describes features of grammar and vocabulary, as well as aspects of  pronunciation.

Difference between accent and  dialect:

1. Accent is the way you pronounce a word.
2. Dialect is a different language (or if you will, a different word)
3. Accent is tone.
4. Accent is special way of pronunciation that concerns a particular region or area.
5. Dialect is further than pronunciation such as distinctive grammar, transcription and words which make the difference between the two terms.