How do we study language change?

Apparent-time studies of language change

Example 7 I discovered one day that my 11-year-old son, David, did not know what the word
wireless meant. Neither did his friends. On the other hand, my great-grandmother never heard
the word radio , and, while my grandmother knew what a radio was, she considered the term
new-fangled. My mother used both wireless and radio to refer to the same object, and though I
understood both terms I have always used radio for preference.

his rather simple example illustrates the way in which information on the language use of
different age groups may reveal the direction of linguistic change in a community. A great deal
of linguistic variation is stable, but some is an indication of linguistic change in progress. The
patterns of deletion of the regular past tense affi x ( -ed ) are stable in Englishspeaking
communities. In Norwich, as elsewhere, the forms [in] vs [ih], and [h]-dropping, discussed in
chapter 6 , are also examples of stable variants. The patterns noted for different groups in the
community have not changed over the last fi fty or sixty years. The substitution of a glottal stop
for [t] in certain positions, on the other hand, is increasing in Norwich. The use of [d] for the
initial sound in then and than is an example of stable variation in New York. There is no
evidence that the vernacular pronunciation with [d] is increasing. The challenge is to identify the
clues which make it possible to predict which current variation will result in change and which
won’t. A steady increase or steady decline in the frequency of a form by age group suggests to a
sociolinguist that a change may be in progress in the speech community, whereas a bellshaped
pattern is more typical of stable variation. It was apparent to Labov that [r] was a prestigious
pronunciation in New York, for instance, since higher social groups used more of it than lower
social groups. It also seemed likely that it was spreading through the community, because
younger people were using more of it than older people. At this point, it is important to compare
this pattern with the normal patterns of different ways of speaking at different ages. In c hapter 7
, I pointed out that the normal pattern for standard or prestige forms was that people used more
of them in their middle years, as illustrated in fi gure 7.3 . Their frequency is low in
adolescence and declines again in old age. So when a standard or prestige form occurs more
often in the speech of younger people than older people, this suggests that it is a new form which
is being introduced and adopted by young people. Comparing the speech of people from
different age groups can be a useful clue, then, to language change. This has been called the
apparent-time method of studying change. Differences between the speech of older people and
younger people are interpreted as indications of changes in progress. Younger speakers tend to
use more of the newer or innovative forms, and the older speakers use more of the older,
conservative forms, the ones they adopted in their own teenage years. When the change involves
the spread of a prestige form or an admired usage, then, it is easy to see the evidence of its
spread. An increase in the use of these forms in the speech of younger people is a clue that a new
form is being introduced.
It is much more diffi cult to identify a change when it involves the introduction and spread of a
less prestigious form, a vernacular form – and these are by far the most frequent kinds of changes
in any language. The spread of a swear word, for example, or a slang word, the spread of a
vernacular pronunciation such as glottal stop for [t], or the use of the same vowel in words like
beer and bear – which of these will result in a linguistic change is very diffi cult to spot
accurately at an early stage. The regular or normal age-grading pattern for any form involves a
higher incidence of vernacular forms among younger people. People normally use more
vernacular forms while they are young, and tend to use more standard forms as they get older
and respond to the pressure of the society’s expectations. This makes it diffi cult to spot the
spread of new vernacular forms by using the distribution of a form in different age groups as a
clue. The normal age-graded distributional pattern is very similar to the pattern for a new form
which is spreading – greater use by younger people (see fi gure 7.3 ). In other words,
someone looking at the normal pattern for a stable vernacular feature like consonant cluster
simplifi cation might think this was spreading because young people simplify clusters more than
older people. In fact, the high use of these forms by young people is just typical for their age
group (an age-grading pattern), and the amount of consonant cluster simplifi cation in their
speech is likely to reduce as they get older. In a social dialect survey of the Sydney community,
HRTs (described in exercise 5 above) were used far more often by teenagers than adults. This
suggested that over time HRTs would become well-established as a feature of Sydney speech.
But the researcher had to ensure, before interpreting the pattern in this way, that this was not
simply a regular pattern which would repeat itself with each generation. Interpreting it as a clue
to change assumes that the teenagers will continue to use the forms they use now as they grow
older, so that these forms will become the norms of the adult community over time. In order to
resolve such problems, we need to examine the reasons for linguistic change, and to identify
factors other than age as clues to the direction of changes in progress. I will return to these issues
below.

Exercise 8 A pattern which showed the frequency of occurrence of a linguistic form peaking in
adolescence would be very difficult to interpret accurately without further information. It could
be

(i) the typical (age-graded) pattern for a stable vernacular variable or (ii) the pattern for a
vernacular variable which is being replaced by a standard or prestige variable (with young people
resisting the new standard) or (iii) the pattern for a new vernacular variable which is
spreading and replacing a standard variable or (iv) a temporary pattern and the form will
disappear when it goes out of fashion

The following patterns are much less ambiguous however. How would you interpret a graph
which showed a peak for the frequency of occurrence of a linguistic form

(a) in young adults’ speech? (b) in middle age? (c) in old age?
Language change in real time

Example 8 In 1970, an American visiting New Zealand noticed with surprise that some children
pronounced words like milk and fi ll with a vowel where he expected to hear [l]. Twenty years
later he revisited the country and was fascinated to fi nd that the pronunciation he had perceived
as so odd on his earlier visit was now widespread throughout the community. Most people
seemed to be using a vowel where he used [l] in words like feel , real , fool , fail , silk and
salt. He had in the meantime discovered that this process of replacing post-vocalic [l] with a
vowel was well-established in the south of England. ‘Would America be next?’ he wondered.

The apparent-time method of studying language change is a useful short-cut for sociolinguists
who generally cannot afford to wait around for twenty years to see what happens in real time.
Sometimes, however, it is possible to build on the work of earlier linguists when studying
change. Dictionaries which provide the date when a form was fi rst noted can assist in tracing
changes in vocabulary over time. The study of Martha’s Vineyard described above built on
earlier descriptions of the Vineyarders’ speech. The Linguistic Atlas of New England provided a
description of the pronunciations of an earlier generation, and so changes in pronunciation which
had occurred on the island over a twenty- to thirty-year period could be identifi ed. O ne very
interesting real time study was reported by Peter Trudgill, who returned to Norwich fi fteen years
after his original study of the speech patterns of Norwich people. He discovered that some of the
variation he had noted had led to linguistic change, as predicted. The vowels of beer and bear ,
for instance, which were still distinct for many speakers in 1968, had completely merged by 1983
for all speakers except those from the highest social group. T here were other changes, however,
that were well under way by 1983 but which had not been noticed in the 1968 speech sample. As
many as 30 per cent of young Norwich people had completely lost the th [k] sound in thing
from their inventory of consonants by 1983. They substituted [f] for th [k] in words like thing
and thin . This seemed to have been a very rapid and dramatic sound change. These changes
were identifi ed by comparing a sample of people in 1968 and another similar sample fi fteen
years later. In other words, this was a study done in real time: a very reliable method of
identifying changes. But where do they start and how do they spread? Why do some instances of
variation become the source of change while other variations do not? Why do some changes
spread and others die out? To begin to answer these questions we need to consider the social
factors which affect language use. In what follows I will briefl y discuss just three social factors
and their relevance to language change – social status, gender and interaction.