Language Alpha and Language Theta were very happy to understand what was happening to them and why. They decided to see the language therapist for the second session too. In this session, the therapist will language-analyze the types of the language changes.

He asks Theta to tell him what kind of changes she experienced from Alpha’s side.

She starts the description:

‘First of all I’ve noticed that he uses new, strange words and expressions. But at the same time, he has lost some old words. It’s very tragically because a language should preserve its old forms but Alpha prefers new trends.’

The therapist: ‘Lexical change. It can happen by borrowing new words or losing old ones.

Theta continues his description: ‘He changes the pronunciation of some words as well.’

The therapist: ‘Just like I suspected. Phonetic and phonological changes. It’s a very typical kind of language change and it can happen in a relatively short time. The language develops a new system among its phonemes. Has he already changed the spelling too?’

Theta: No, he hasn’t yet. But I’ve noticed semantic changes as well. for example, in my usage awful means ‘inspiring wonder’, but in his usage it has a negative meaning. Or by ‘to kill’ he means ‘to slaughter’.  By saying ‘mouse’ he doesn’t mean only the animal, but also a computer device.

The therapist: ‘Hmm. His vocabulary is going through the process of pejoration, hyperbole and metaphor. Pejoration is a process when a word changes its meaning in a negative sense, hyperbole is a process when words change from weaker to stronger meaning. Metaphor is when change occurs based on similarity of things. There are several kinds of semantic change.’

Theta:  ‘He doesn’t show grammatical relationships through inflectional changes in his words, but he represents the grammatical relationships through word order.

The therapist: ‘It sounds serious. It means the changes in syntax have already started. He is becoming an analytical language instead of synthetic.

Now I am going to give my diagnosis:

Diagnosis:

Alpha is becoming another language while Theta, is an old language and preserves more archaic forms. You must hurry up, guys, otherwise, you will not understand and not even recognize each other soon. First of all, further diagnosis is needed. For the diagnosis of lexical change Alpha has to go to onomasiology. To understand what kind of semantic change Alpha went through I’ll send him to several places: etymology, onomasiology, semasiology, and semantics. For phonetic, phonological and syntactic analyses go to the descriptive linguistics. At the end, to have a wider overview, you have to go to the historical linguistics.’

Have you noticed any type of change in your language?