• Annual Meetings & Institutes
• What is Linguistics?
• LSA Publications

• Annual Meetings & Institutes
• What is Linguistics?
• LSA Publications

Is English changing?

Yes, and so is every other human language! Language is always changing, evolving, and adapting to the needs of its users. This isn’t a bad thing; if English hadn’t changed since, say, 1950, we wouldn’t have words to refer to modems, fax machines, or cable TV. As long as the needs of language users continue to change, so will the language. The change is so slow that from year to year we hardly notice it, except to grumble every so often about the ‘poor English’ being used by the younger generation! However, reading Shakespeare’s writings from the sixteenth century can be difficult. If you go back a couple more centuries, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are very tough sledding, and if you went back another 500 years to try to read Beowulf, it would be like reading a different language.

Why does language change?

Language changes for several reasons. First, it changes because the needs of its speakers change. New technologies, new products, and new experiences require new words to refer to them clearly and efficiently. Consider texting: originally it was called text messaging, because it allowed one person to send another text rather than voice messages by phone. As that became more common, people began using the shorter form text to refer to both the message and the process, as in I just got a text or I’ll text Sylvia right now.

Another reason for change is that no two people have had exactly the same language experience. We all know a slightly different set of words and constructions, depending on our age, job, education level, region of the country, and so on. We pick up new words and phrases from all the different people we talk with, and these combine to make something new and unlike any other person’s particular way of speaking. At the same time, various groups in society use language as a way of marking their group identity; showing who is and isn’t a member of the group.

Many of the changes that occur in language begin with teens and young adults. As young people interact with others their own age, their language grows to include words, phrases, and constructions that are different from those of the older generation. Some have a short life span (heard groovy lately?), but others stick around to affect the language as a whole.

We get new words from many different places. We borrow them from other languages (sushi, chutzpah), we create them by shortening longer words (gym from gymnasium) or by combining words (brunch from breakfast and lunch), and we make them out of proper names (Levis, fahrenheit). Sometimes we even create a new word by being wrong about the analysis of an existing word, like how the word pea was created. Four hundred years ago, the word pease was used to refer to either a single pea or a bunch of them, but over time, people assumed Excerpt from Beowulf

that pease was a plural form, for which pea must be the singular. Therefore, a new word, pea, was born. The same thing would happen if people began to think of the word cheese as referring to more than one chee.

Word order also changes, though this process is much slower. Old English word order was much more ‘free’ than that of Modern English, and even comparing the Early Modern English of the King James Bible with today’s English shows differences in word order. For example , the King James Bible translates Matthew 6:28 as “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not.” In a more recent translation, the last phrase is translated as “they do not toil,” because English no longer places not after the verb in a sentence.