Section 3.3 Language Change and Attitudes
Language is always changing. New words enter the vocabulary, pronunciations shift, grammatical patterns evolve. This change is natural, inevitable, and—from a linguistic perspective—neither good nor bad. It’s just what happens when living communities use language over time.
The Universality of Change.
Every living language changes. Every. Single. One. There are no exceptions.
We can observe this by comparing historical stages of English:
Old English (c. 450-1100):
Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon...(Beowulf, c. 1000)
Middle English (c. 1100-1500):
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote...(Chaucer, c. 1400)
Early Modern English (c. 1500-1700):
To be, or not to be: that is the question.(Shakespeare, 1603)
Modern English:
This sentence is immediately comprehensible.
Each stage differs dramatically from the others. Old English is completely foreign to modern readers—it requires translation. Middle English is partially comprehensible with effort. Early Modern English is mostly accessible but noticeably different. The language never stopped changing; we just notice older changes less because we learned the results.
Mechanisms of Change.
Sound change.
Sound change alters pronunciation systematically. The "Great Vowel Shift" (roughly 1400-1700) transformed English vowels: “house” was once pronounced like “hoose”, “name” like “nahm”. More recently, many American dialects have undergone vowel shifts that linguists are still documenting.
Grammatical change.
Grammatical change alters morphology and syntax. English has lost most of its case endings (Old English had four cases, like German; Modern English only preserves case in pronouns). Word order has become more fixed as inflectional endings disappeared. New constructions emerge: the progressive (“I am going”) expanded dramatically in Modern English.
Lexical change.
Lexical change adds, removes, and shifts words. New words enter through:
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Coining: blog, selfie, doomscrolling
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Borrowing: sushi, yoga, algorithm
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Compounding: smartphone, cybersecurity
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Derivation: unfriend, mansplain
Old words become obsolete (forsooth, prithee) or shift meaning (awful once meant "inspiring awe"; nice once meant "foolish"; silly once meant "blessed").
Semantic change.
Semantic change shifts meanings. “Decimate” originally meant "kill one in ten"; now it means "devastate." “Literally” is increasingly used for emphasis rather than literal meaning. Such shifts are as old as language itself.
Why People Resist Change.
If change is natural and universal, why do people resist it so strongly?
Nostalgia: People associate earlier stages of language with their youth or with respected figures from the past. The language of our grandparents sounds more "proper" because we associate it with authority.
Social markers: As discussed above, language features can mark social identity. Resisting change is often about resisting the social changes that new language represents. Objections to singular “they” are often really about discomfort with changing gender norms.
Loss aversion: People notice what seems to be lost (distinctions, words, "rules") more than what’s gained. We don’t celebrate new expressive resources as readily as we mourn "declining standards."
Education and investment: People who learned prescriptive rules have invested effort in mastering them. It’s uncomfortable to learn that those rules might be arbitrary or changing.
Genuine confusion: Occasionally, new usages do create temporary ambiguity. But languages develop ways to resolve ambiguity; if a change persists despite creating confusion, the confusion usually wasn’t actually that serious.
Embracing Change.
From a descriptive perspective, change is neither good nor bad. Old forms aren’t better than new ones; they’re just older. Efforts to freeze language in some imagined perfect state are doomed to fail, and they reflect a misunderstanding of what language is.
Language belongs to its speakers, and it will continue to evolve as they use it. The "errors" that horrify prescriptivists today are often the standard forms of tomorrow. Shakespeare used “you” as a singular (replacing “thou”); we don’t consider that an error. Chaucer used double negatives; we don’t consider him uneducated.
What can you do with this knowledge?
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Notice your own reactions to unfamiliar language—are they linguistic or social?
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Distinguish between genuine confusion and mere unfamiliarity
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Recognize that your own "standard" language was once innovative
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Appreciate the creativity that drives language change
