1.1 Language change

What does it mean for language to have a history? Surely Latin is Latin whether it’s Latin of Plautus or Latin of Cicero or Latin of Apuleius?

Yeah. Fair point, but all languages have histories. The problem is we tend to think of them, in literate societies at least, as fixed entities. And I think this is really to do with written language. If you think of written English for example, in a single person’s lifetime, it’s very hard to be conscious of any sense of change. But if you look at the written English of earlier periods, then it’s very obvious there has been considerable change. People have trouble reading Shakespeare. The essential thing then is to make sure we distinguish between written and spoken language. Written language tends to be relatively fixed by convention, tradition and often by state institutions, education system, and so on. But speech changes all the time and, eventually, written language will start to accommodate some of the changes that are taking place in the spoken language. You just have to listen to people talking English now to know that spoken language changes much more readily than written language. Think of grandparents and the problems they sometimes have listening to their teenage grandchildren. Over time, spoken language just changes quite radically.

But aren’t the changes we hear in speech just sloppiness or laziness? The speech of teenage children is full of grammatical mistakes, isn’t it?

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. We do tend to think of change as somehow change from the norm, and therefore change for the worse, sloppy, incorrect, and people obviously feel very strongly about that, sometimes writing letters to newspapers about the use of “hopefully” and what have you. I think it’s because we are very attached to the idea of a standard written form of language, with fixed rules that we learned at school, and these somehow represent the correct form of the language. But lots of these rules we’ve learned, the kind of thing, you know, of don’t put a preposition at the end of the sentence, or don’t split an infinitive. These aren’t real rules of English at all; they’re artificial impositions, set up really for the written language, which have then been partially imposed on spoken styles as well. But the living form of the language really doesn’t conform to these things at all, and knowing these rules of written English is partly just a matter of showing off the fact that you’ve had a ‘good education.’

But the changes which take place, even so, are just fashionable changes, aren’t they? The words come into the language. One year we have a word like ‘bling’ or ‘chav’ which everyone seems to use and next year they disappear. Even now ‘bling’ is on its way out, it seems.

Well, that’s certainly true, I mean, particularly individual slang words, they do tend to be short-lived in the spoken language but that’s not the full story. Other changes take hold, can take hold, and then become quite general amongst the whole population. Most English people don’t pronounce an R sound now after vowels in words like ‘for’ and ‘farm’. There are of course still some dialects of English where that is the norm but these are now seen as somehow substandard. But if you went back over a hundred years, not pronouncing the R would be seen as a mistake, and an example of laziness and sloppiness, so things do change. The R-less variety is now absolutely the standard, it’s the way BBC announcers speak, it’s the way the royal family speaks. And that just goes to show, there’s nothing inherently good or bad about anything. Things change, full stop.