Language change: progress or decay? review
Language change
is inevitable. Often we encounter sayings like language change is harmful,
language change leads the language to extinction. Does language die or does a
new one arise by the process of change?
Jean Aitchison
the Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at the University of
Oxford, discusses these big questions in her book: Language change: Progress or
decay?
In the first
chapters, she focuses on the question of inevitability of language change, the
methods of historical linguistics, and the study of language variation. Why do
languages change? There are some factors like social factors of prestige,
gender, and race. Language changes counter social pressure too, but can be a
result of a fashion, social prestige, foreign influence and phonetic and
syntactic naturalness. Interestingly, she says that there are inherent reasons
for language change as well. She deals with the types of language change like
syntactic and semantic changes. And once change occurs, it may cause a chain-reaction.
The initial
question arises in the last chapters again. Do languages become extinct or do
they change into other languages? To answer this question she discusses the
status of pidgin and creole languages where we can observe how languages are
born; assimilation ad code-switching which can be considered as symptoms of
language death. However, she claims that languages neither progress nor decay.
Language change is none of these.
Her book
consists of seventeen chapters, so it’s not a short read, but very comprehensive
and readable, so non-experts can understand it easily.
Do you have
other books or articles to recommend? Leave me a comment.