How Fast Is Standard English Changing

C HANGE IN LANGUAGE is a fact generally acknowledged, though with different feelings on the part of different groups. The purists accept it with regret as a necessary evil, the iconoclasts with delight as evolutionary progress, and the linguists with perhaps a slightly smug scientific detachment as a phenomenon. But it has to be accepted. And with its acceptance arises a curiosity as to the rate of the change, such queries as whether English changed faster right after the Norman Conquest than before, or whether Standard English is today changing faster than it did, say, fifty years ago. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that even with the wealth of material at our disposal for an examination of contemporary English, we are hardly in a position to make any confident statements about rate of change. Perhaps I should say rather that it is this very wealth of evidence which forces us to hesitate about making any positive assertions. For older stages of the language we are less embarrassed by such overwhelming evidence. In fact, the very paucity of the material often suggests a simplicity which can hardly have existed. No discussion of change in language can be meaningful unless the signification of the terms change and language is restricted at the outset. For this brief discussion I shall therefore restrict the term change to alterations in form and structure, including, of course, phonology, ignoring as far as possible alterations in meaning. The term language I shall use, however, in the broad sense of a group of mutually intelligible dialects. This will prove, I believe, the most useful definition because it corresponds most nearly, I suspect, to what most people understand by the term. This definition of language, however, immediately confronts us with a paradox. If a language is a complex of dialects, it is not a uniform thing, even though the dialects are mutually intelligible, for the term dialect is normally understood as a linguistic pattern which varies from that of the rest of the language. Therefore, in a language consisting of a number of dialects, there will be considerable variety in forms and structures; since no speaker of the language will have familiarity with all its dialectal varieties, each speaker will occasionally be confronted with patterns which differ from his own. These variants he will interpret, with the usual parochialism of the linguistically naive, as later deviations from his own original pattern. The paradox is, therefore, that what may appear to the individual speaker as a neologism may

Linguistics · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · History · Philosophy