Mechanisms of language change

All natural languages are subject to constant change. Our focus in this chapter is on understanding the types of change which can occur, and the conditions which may favour or inhibit them.

As we saw in Chapter 2, the late-nineteenth-century Neogrammarians attempted to bring scientific rigour to the study of sound change by developing hypotheses which were testable and falsifiable. Sound changes, they claimed, were subject to laws which applied without exception, and were in many cases triggered by factors internal to the language itself. These internally motivated changes were of more interest to the Neogrammarians than those which arise from contact between speakers, or externally motivated changes. Recent work in variationist sociolinguistics, however, focusing on changes in progress rather than on those which have already happened, has suggested that this neat dichotomy may in fact be oversimplistic. We will therefore reconsider the traditional division between internal and external factors from a variationist perspective, and explore evidence of a link between types of change observed and the social structure of the communities in which they occur.

Internally motivated change

Although independent of grammar, sound changes might well have important consequences for the grammatical system. A good example is the extreme erosion of final consonants in French, which has left singular and plural sounding identical in many cases. Labov (1994: 569) quotes a speech by Charles De Gaulle in Madagascar in which he states: ‘Je m’adresse aux peuples français – au pluriel’ (‘I address the French peoples – in the plural’), clearly feeling the need to add ‘au pluriel’ because singular au peuple and plural aux peuples [opæpl] are homophonous.

While we cannot predict which changes will happen and when, some changes do appear to be more natural than others. Internally motivated changes of this kind often result in reduced articulatory effort on the part of the speaker, as in the examples below:

REDUCTION/LOSS OF UNSTRESSED VOWELS

Vowels in unstressed position often reduce, that is, they are pronounced with a weaker articulation. Compare photograph [ٰfəɷtəgra:f] and photography [fəٰtɒgrəfi], in which the vowels closest to the stressed syllable reduce to schwa [ə], returning the tongue to its natural rest position. Similarly, unstressed final Latin syllables were lost altogether in the evolution to French. A consequence of this is that gender is far more difficult to determine from noun endings in French than it is in Latin. In the examples below, the masculine -us and feminine -a endings have eroded, leaving monosyllabic masculine and feminine nouns which end in consonant:

• Lt. murus > Fr. murs > mur [myr]

• Lt. sala > Fr. salle [sal]

ASSIMILATION

It is common for one sound to be affected by, or assimilate to, a neighbouring sound: we saw in Chapter 5, for example, that nasal stops are homorganic with a following oral stop, a case of regressive assimilation. In the examples below, the nasal consonant takes the place of articulation of the consonant that follows:

• in+box [Imbɒks] (bilabial)

• in+correct [Iŋkəɹekt] (velar)

The nasal vowels of French have all emerged from an assimilation process, namely nasalization of a vowel in readiness for a nasal consonant. The nasal consonants have subsequently been lost, but remain orthographically:

• daim \[d <Image src="OPS/images/etil.png" alt="image" />]

• son \[s <Image src="OPS/images/ctil.png" alt="image" />]

• quand [kã]

SIMPLIFICATION OF CONSONANT CLUSTERS

Complex groups of consonants tend to simplify, particularly in rapid speech:

• handbag [handbag] > [hambag]

• sixth [sIksθ] > [sIkθ]

• textbook [tεkstbɷk] > [tεksbɷk]

WEAKENING OF INTERVOCALIC UNVOICED STOPS

Voiceless stops between vowels frequently become voiced, like the vowels before and after them, and may then become fricatives, allowing uninterrupted flow between vowels and saving articulatory effort. In some cases they may disappear altogether, as developments from Latin to Spanish and French demonstrate:

• Lt. aqua > Sp. agua [aɤua] [k > g > ɤ]

• Lt. sapere > Fr. savoir [p > b > v]

• Lt. mater > Fr. mère [t > d > Ø]

Systemic changes

Internally motivated sound changes may have profound consequences for grammar, as the De Gaulle example above illustrated, and in some cases, what the Neogrammarians identified as analogy repairs the damage, by aligning irregular forms with regular ones.

Analogy is therefore seen as a kind of housekeeping device, which resignedly picks up at least some of the mess made by the more impetuous sound change as it hurtles blindly through the grammar. (…) Analogy, however, is primarily concerned with the link between sound and meaning, which combine to express particular morphemes or meaningful units. The task of analogy is then to maintain this link by keeping sound structure, grammatical structure and semantic structure in line, especially when sound change might have made their relationship opaque.(McMahon 1994: 70)

A good example of analogy is provided by plurals in Old English, the forms of which varied by gender and noun-class, e.g. stanas ‘stones’ (sg. stān; masculine) but scipu ‘ships’ (sg. scip, neuter).

As gender and case inflections were lost by the end of Middle English period (stanas > stanes > stones), final s was left as the only plural marker, and was extended to nouns like ship which had formed their Old English plurals in different ways. Something similar is happening with so-called intrusive r in English. As we saw in Chapter 6, word-final /r/ has been lost from many varieties of English in non-pre-vocalic positions, but not before a following vowel, so a wine lover `/lʌvə/` but a lover `/lʌvər/` of fine wine. This /r/ at word boundaries has been extended by analogy to many other words which never had /r/ in the first place:

• law /lɔ:/ but law /r/ of averages

• India /Indiə/ but India /r/ and Pakistan

Another important internal process is grammaticalization, by which a full lexical word acquires a grammatical function. An example here is back, which in its original meaning refers to the rear of the human torso, a meaning lost in the complex preposition at the back of, meaning ‘behind’. Similarly, the negative particle pas in French originally had only its full lexical meaning of ‘step’, and was used to reinforce the negative ne with some related verbs, e.g. il _ne_ marcha _pas_ (‘He did not walk a step’). But gradually in negative contexts it lost the meaning ‘step’ and became a general marker of negation, e.g Il ne parle _pas_ (‘He does not speak’, not ‘He doesn’t speak a step’). The loss of lexical meaning that accompanies grammaticalization is known as semantic bleaching; very often phonetic reduction is also involved as the item evolves from lexical to functional unit (see Case study below).

Case study: It’s grammaticalization, innit?

An interesting example of grammaticalization, affecting a particular kind of interrogative structure, is currently under way in London English. Tag questions are generally used to monitor whether the interlocutor has understood, or is following the conversation, by inviting feedback from him/her (generally a nod of assent will do):

He does a good job, **doesn’t he?**

They aren’t coming, **are they?**

She has done it, **hasn’t she?**

These structures in English are many in number and surprisingly complex. As in the above examples, they involve negation of a modal or auxiliary verb, or removal of the negation if it is already negative, then inversion of subject and verb; there are also some irregular forms to contend with (\*willn’t > won’t; \*amn’t > aren’t). The multiple tag questions of English contrast with one or two in German, which manages perfectly well with oder? (literally: ‘or?’) or nicht wahr? (literally: ‘not true?’). A fairly recent development in London English, however, is for one form, innit?, to be used in all cases:

It’s true, **innit?** (\< isn’t it?)

We saw him on Saturday, **innit?** (\< didn’t we?)

They’re not staying here, **innit?** (\< are they?)

As a contraction of the most commonly used tag question is it not? > isn’t it? > [InIt/InI] innit? displays the phonetic reduction typical of grammaticalization; the loss of its specific meaning ‘is it not?’ allows it to be used as both a negative and a positive tag question, and with modal and auxiliary verbs other than to be. Innit, in other words, has been semantically bleached in this context, like French pas in the previous example. Although currently viewed as a low-status form in English, provoking indignation (or cardiac arrest) among purists, innit? appears to be following the path already trodden by n’est-ce pas? in French, which likewise reduced phonetically and lost its association with the verb to be, and ultimately became a perfectly acceptable standard construction (‘Le Président est d’accord avec vous, n’est-ce pas?’ – literally, ‘The President agrees with you, innit?’).

Many internally motivated grammatical changes can be seen to make life easier for the speaker by making the system as a whole more economical. This is notably the case when a language sheds grammatical or morphosyntactic complexity. Modern Swedish, for example, has largely lost personal endings on the verb, and now distinguishes two rather than three genders, masculine and feminine having merged into a ‘common’ gender contrasting with neuter. French provides a number of examples of elimination of redundancy, i.e. the removal in speech of repeated grammatical information, which is still required by the more conservative written norm:

(a) &#xA0;Le**s** petite**s** princesse**s** blanche**s** arriv**ent**. ‘The little white princesses arrive’(b) &#xA0;La petite princesse blanche arrive. ‘The little white princess arrives’

In (a) there are five suffixal plural markers (marked in bold), but phonetic erosion has left only one plural marker in speech, namely the article les [le], which contrasts with singular la [la] in this frame (see (b)). Written French also maintains a distinction in the tense system which has been lost from speech:

Spotlight: Did we lose the perfect tense already?

Although the fine distinction between simple past and perfect tense has been lost from spoken French, it generally survives in English, but may be neutralized in favour of the simple past in some US English varieties, as in:

Did you eat yet?

I told him already!

Often greeted with bemusement by British English speakers, such sentences generally pass without comment in the United States.

The simple past (or ‘past historic’) forms on the left locate an action entirely in the past, while the perfect tense forms on the right signal that a past action has present relevance. In spoken French, only the perfect tense is used, so j’ai fait now means both ‘I did’ and ‘I have done’, and the subtle distinction between the two, generally retained in English (see Spotlight above), has been lost from the tense system. The decline of the past historic is best understood once again in terms of structural economy. A separate verb form serving to locate an action entirely in the past is redundant when this information is usually either clear from context, or indicated elsewhere in the sentence by means of a temporal adverbial adjunct, e.g.:

• je le fis hier (‘I did it yesterday’)

• la guerre se termina en 1945 (‘The war ended in 1945’)

Furthermore, the past historic has a full paradigm of personal endings and numerous irregular stems (e.g. naître ‘to be born’; je naquis ‘I was born’), so its loss from the system represents a gain in structural economy on two counts.

The functional principle of increased economy can also explain certain changes to the phonological system as a whole. Languages show a strong tendency to eliminate phonemic oppositions with low functional load, i.e. those which affect few pairs of words. A good example from English is the /ʍ/ – /W/ opposition, which used to distinguish words beginning wh- from those beginning w-

• which – witch

• whales – Wales

• white – Wight

• where – wear

Although the opposition is maintained in some areas, most English speakers now no longer use the /ʍ/ phoneme. Reducing the number of phonemes in the inventory by one represents a gain in economy at relatively small cost: while some homonymic clashes do result, these are few in number and easily resolved in context (e.g. ‘Whales have been spotted off the coast of Wales’). The /W/ – /ʍ/ opposition, like that of the perfect and past historic tense in French, is a luxury the system can manage without.

Key idea: Changes to make life easier

Internally motivated changes are generally seen to promote reduced effort on the part of the speaker. This might be achieved by:

•  reduced articulatory effort•  overall structural simplification (loss of inflections, smaller phoneme inventories etc.)

CHAIN SHIFTS

Chain shifts, which affect vowels, are a different kind of systemic change, which restore balance rather than promote economy. The best known example is the Great Vowel Shift (GVS) of English, which affected all the long vowels between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries:

Figure 13.1: The Great English Vowel Shift (GVS)

The chain shift appears to have been triggered by a change in realization of the /i:/ vowel in words like bite and side, which would once have been pronounced [bi:tə] and [si:də], but diphthongized to [əI], and later [aI] similar developments affected the back vowel /u:/ in, for example, house [hu:sə], and mouse [mu:sə], which diphthongized to [əɷ] (and later [aɷ]) This left a space in the area formerly occupied by /u:/ and /i:/, into which the vowels immediately below them, i.e. half-close /e:/ and /o:/ of beet and boot respectively, could move. This is called a drag chain effect, in that a movement in one position frees up space into which other vowels may move, but the converse push chain effects appear also to have been involved in GVS. The open front vowel /a:/ of mate ([ma:tə]) shifted initially to [æ:] and then to [ε:], forcing the vowel in the existing [ε:] set (e.g. beat) to move up into the /e:/ position.

Similar developments affected long back vowels. The overall effect of these changes from a systemic point of view has been to maximize available space for vowel oppositions in the vocal tract, without changing the overall number of oppositions available. A consequence is the rather chaotic mismatch between sound and grapheme which we witness in English spelling. The letter i now represents /ai/ rather than /i:/ (except in words like ski, borrowed in this case from Norwegian, where the shift did not take place); ee represents /i:/ rather than /e:/ in tree, free etc.; oo represents /u:/ rather than /o:/ in words such as loop, and cool and so on.

Externally motivated change

Externally motivated changes arise from contact between speakers of different varieties. Normally the contact varieties are closely related, but contact between speakers of mutually incomprehensible languages has also in some cases led to significant structural change. An early study by Gumperz and Wilson showed how regular and prolonged contact between speakers of Kannada, Marathi and Urdu in Kupwar, India, brought about significant convergence between the languages at the syntactic level, even though their lexicons remained distinct.

Case study: Convergence in the Balkans

In the Balkans, what is known as a Sprachbund (from German: ‘language union’) has emerged between a number of superficially unrelated languages, whose grammars have converged in quite surprising ways. Albanian, Rumanian and Bulgarian (but not Greek) have acquired suffixal definite articles (e.g. Albanian mik-u ‘friend-the’; Bulgarian trup-at ‘body-the’, Romanian om-ul ‘man-the’: data from Bynon 1990: 246–7), while all four languages use constructions involving a conjunction and a subjunctive verb form rather than an infinitive, as in most European languages outside the Sprachbund. The sentence ‘give me (something) to drink’, for example, would be rendered ‘give me that I drink’:

Romanian da-mi sa beau

Bulgarian daj mi da pija

Albanian a-më të pi

Greek dos mou na pio

Particular attention has been paid in recent years, however, to exploring the outcomes of contact between speakers of different varieties of the same language. This interest has been fuelled in part by increasing urbanization, which brings together speakers of different varieties in new and unfamiliar settings (the world’s officially urban population crossed the 50 per cent threshold for the first time in 2009). In his groundbreaking work Dialects in Contact, Peter Trudgill observes that, where contact occurs between speakers of different varieties who are fairly well disposed towards one another, a likely outcome is accommodation, i.e. speakers will unconsciously begin to converge their speech in a variety of ways. The most obvious of these is accent convergence: one notices, for example, that many Britons living and working in the United States begin to replace their intervocalic [t] in words like better, matter with a flapped \[

].

Over time, accommodation can lead to long-term changes in linguistic behaviour. Of particular interest in this context are settlements which have seen rapid and extensive migration (for example, so-called ‘new towns’ such as Basildon, Bracknell or Milton Keynes in the UK). What happens to the ensuing dialect mix as immigrants settle into their new environment, and how do their children negotiate the linguistically complex and heterogeneous world in which they find themselves?

Key idea: Accommodation

Accommodation, i.e. speakers’ tendency to converge their speech with that of interlocutors to whom they are favourably disposed, is an important driver of change in contact situations.

Trudgill argues that, in such contact situations, reduction is likely to occur, i.e. many of the competing lexical, phonological and morphological variants will be lost. Eventually a new, focused compromise dialect or koiné may emerge, containing some forms from the input dialects, and some new forms which were present in none of them. Reduction is driven primarily by two processes – both of which, in their different ways, reflect the difficulties encountered by post-adolescent learners in acquiring new varieties.

The first process, levelling, involves the selection of forms with the widest currency in the new setting. Where several forms are in competition, the one used by a majority of speakers or that occurs in most of the input dialects is more likely to prevail than one used by very few speakers. In the northern Swedish town of Burträsk, speakers have used both standard Swedish and a local dialect, burträskmål, for many years. As the town became integrated with its surrounding area for administrative purposes, however, contact with the wider region increased and a new compromise variety or Regional Standard emerged. Research by Mats Thelander revealed that this new variety combined burträskmål and standard forms, but that the local forms which survived in Regional Standard were those which were most widely used in the dialects of northern Sweden.

Similarly in Avion, France, most local dialect forms were found by Hornsby (2006) to be obsolescent, but those which were surviving best, for example, alle [al] for the feminine third person pronoun (Standard French elle), were those which were most widely represented among the dialects of northern France where Avion is situated.

In dialect contact and dialect mixture situations there may be an enormous amount of variation in the early stages. However, as time passes, focusing takes place by means of a reduction of the forms available. This reduction takes place through the process of koinéization, which consists of the levelling out of minority and otherwise marked speech forms, and of simplification, which involves, crucially, a reduction in irregularities.Trudgill (1986: 107–8)

Simplification, on the other hand, favours forms which are morphosyntactically simple – by virtue for example of having less or more regular inflection – over those which are more complex and therefore present a greater challenge for post-adolescent learners. In the new Norwegian industrial town of Høyanger, contact between speakers of many dialects has led to erosion of irregularities in both standard Norwegian (Nynorsk) and western Norwegian dialects. A good example, reported by Omdal (1977; see also Trudgill 1986: 95–9) is the regularization of noun plural forms. Generally, masculine nouns take an -ar ending and feminines take -er, but there are a number of exceptions: masculine benk (‘bench’) pluralizes as benker, while feminine byr (‘bog’) has the plural byrar. As can be seen below, these anomalies have been removed in Modern Høyanger dialect, with masculines now consistently having the -a and feminines the -e ending, while the final /r/ deletion rule of North Vestland dialects has been retained:

Table 13.1: Regularization of plural forms in Høyanger Norwegian (after Trudgill 1986: 103)

Key idea: Koinés

Koinés are new compromise varieties which emerge from contact between speakers of different varieties. Koinéization is driven primarily by two processes:

•  Levelling – the retention of forms which are used by a large number of speakers•  Simplification – the retention of forms which are morphologically simple or more regular, and therefore easier for post-adolescent learners to acquire.

Two other contact outcomes need also to be mentioned. In the first, incomplete accommodation between speakers of different dialects results in the creation of interdialect forms. In northern France, for example, contact between speakers of dialect and standard French has produced new compromise regional French forms, which were present in neither:

Table 13.2: Interdialect forms in northern regional French (after Hornsby 2006: 106)

Key idea: Networks and rate of change

Externally motivated change is generally slow in communities where social networks are dense and multiplex, particularly in isolated areas where there are few weak ties to other networks. Conversely, in communities characterized by low-density social networks, change is more rapid because there are large numbers of weak ties between networks, which facilitate the transmission of new variants.

Figure 13.2: High- and low-density networks (after Milroy 1987: 20)

Dense and multiplex networks have strong internal ties, but few external ones: they are typically found in relatively isolated areas. Low-density networks, by contrast, have high numbers of weak ties, i.e. casual links between its members and those of other networks. Investment in these weak ties by either side is often minimal, but they are important nonetheless in providing the bridges between networks across which change can be transmitted. Low-density networks typify high-contact areas, notably major cities or areas of high population density where communications and transport infrastructure are good.

The relative conservatism of Faroese is best understood in terms of the isolation and village-based social structure of the Faroe Islands. With a population of around 50,000 people living on small, remote islands situated nearly 1,000 km from the kingdom of Denmark of which they form part, the Faroe Islands consist largely of close-knit communities with relatively few weak ties bringing in changes from outside. Changes are few in number, but where they do occur, they may preserve or even increase linguistic complexity because dense, multiplex social networks with few outsiders are better placed to support it than those with an abundance of weak ties to members of other networks, with whom unfamiliar forms have be negotiated.

By contrast, Denmark, a small and relatively densely populated country situated on the European mainland at a crossroads between Germany, with which it shares a land border, and the Scandinavian countries, with which it shares close economic and cultural ties, is far from isolated. Consequently, the changes witnessed in mainland Danish have tended to be of the simplifying kind associated with high-contact areas – for example, a gradual shift from a synthetic (highly inflected) structure to an analytical one (in which grammatical relations are more usually marked by free morphemes, e.g. prepositions). Trudgill has suggested a typology of changes associated with high- and low-contact situations, which can be seen in the following table.

Table 13.4: Changes in different contact situations (after Trudgill 1989: 231)

Case study: Contact, change and class in post-war Britain

A good example of a middle-class led phonological change in British English is that of the vowel in a set of monosyllables ending in a front consonant including off, cloth and lost, which changed over the course of the twentieth century from /ɔ:/ to /ɒ:/. The change worked its way outwards from the intermediate classes, but took longest to reach the peripheral classes at the very top and bottom of the hierarchy, who were most socially isolated, and retained the conservative /ɔ:/ pronunciation (stereotypically Get orf!, Oh Gawd!) long after most people had switched to /ɒ:/.

Few people still use /ɔ:/ in this context today, but progress of the change in the 1970s made for some unlikely bedfellows, with Harrow-educated equestrian commentator Dorian Williams using the same /ɔ:/ vowel as fictional working-class bigot Alf Garnett, played by Warren Mitchell in the popular sitcom Till Death Us Do Part.

We need, in conclusion, to use the term ‘natural change’ with great care. Processes that linguists have hitherto assumed to be natural may well only be so for the modern high-contact, urbanized societies with which they happen to be most familiar, but which historically have not been the norm. The effects of contact and isolation on linguistic change have led linguists in recent years to question the equi-complexity hypothesis, namely the axiomatic view that all natural languages are equally complex. Keen to dispel myths about ‘primitive’ or ‘inferior’ languages, which have no basis in fact, linguists have staunchly maintained that ‘all languages are equal’ and point out, for example, that children across the globe acquire their mother tongue, whatever it may be, in roughly the same amount of time.

But languages may, in fact, be unequally complex from the perspective of the post-adolescent learner: Vietnamese, for example, is likely to pose more problems than Spanish for a native speaker of English, but the reverse may well be true for a Chinese speaker. Faroese and Danish may seem equally straightforward to their native speakers, but for outsiders Faroese undoubtedly presents additional challenges by virtue of its greater morphosyntactic complexity. Moreover, if we accept that some changes, typically those which occur in high-contact areas, do result in simplification, then the equi-complexity thesis can be maintained only if every change of the ‘simplifying’ kind is necessarily matched by a corresponding increase in complexity elsewhere in the system.

Key idea: Linguistic change in two directions

Linguistic changes of a simplifying kind are common in high-contact areas and were long assumed to be natural. But changes in the opposite direction – leading to greater complexity – have also been observed, particularly in areas which are relatively isolated.

As Trudgill points out, the historically atypical experience of educated, standard European language speakers tends to cloud our judgement of what is ‘normal’ in language. This needs to be modified if language diversity and change is to be properly understood:

Some years ago I was in conversation with a very eminent, intelligent and humane generative linguist. I asked him how he would handle, in his current theoretical model, the phenomenon of switch reference. He said something like: ‘I don’t know. That's something you only get in exotic languages, isn’t it? I don’t know anything about exotic languages.’ Perhaps I am being unfair, but one implication could perhaps be drawn. If a phenomenon occurs only in a small faraway language which appears exotic to an academic speaker of a standard variety of a European language, it is not really worth bothering about.In fact (…) these ‘exotic languages’ with their mature phenomena are actually, especially from a diachronic perspective, not exotic at all. They are normal. They are precisely what we should be bothering about. This is what all human languages must have been like throughout most of the tens of thousands of years of human history on this planet. It is the creoloids and koinés and creoles that have developed in the last two thousand years, and particularly in the last 500 years, that must be weird and unrepresentative.(Trudgill 2011: 277–8)

If we are serious about understanding language change, then we need to turn our attention to low-contact and often poorly documented languages as well as those with which we are most familiar. And we had better get a move on: with only 10 per cent of the world’s languages reckoned to be ‘safe’ for the remainder of this century, a wealth of potentially fascinating data is disappearing fast.

Fact-check

1. [1](answers.mdx#rfn13-1)  What have internally motivated changes been typically assumed to do?

1. Occur without exception

1. Make life easier for the speaker

1. Involve phonetic reduction

1. Result from contact with speakers of other varieties

1. [2](answers.mdx#rfn13-2)  What does analogy involve?

1. Removal of irregularity

1. Prescriptive grammars

1. Elimination of redundancy

1. Phonetic erosion

1. [3](answers.mdx#rfn13-3)  Generalization of innit? in London English is an example of what?

1. Reduction

1. Koinéization

1. Grammaticalization

1. A chain shift

1. [4](answers.mdx#rfn13-4)  Why has the phonemic opposition /ʍ/ – /W/ has been lost in many varieties of English?

1. It had a low functional load

1. /ʍ/ is difficult for English speakers to pronounce

1. It was involved in too many contrasts

1. The two phonemes sound too similar

1. [5](answers.mdx#rfn13-5)  Which of these is not a likely outcome of linguistic contact?

1. Simplification

1. Reduction

1. Levelling

1. Increased morphosyntactic complexity

1. [6](answers.mdx#rfn13-6)  What is a Sprachbund?

1. An international language organization

1. A group of languages which have converged through contact

1. A small dog of German extraction

1. A family of genetically related languages

1. [7](answers.mdx#rfn13-7)  What was the Great English Vowel Shift?

1. A prescriptive rule

1. A chain shift involving short vowels

1. A chain shift involving long vowels

1. A major reform of English spelling

1. [8](answers.mdx#rfn13-8)  What does assimilation involve?

1. The influence of one sound on another

1. Loss of unstressed vowels

1. Simplification of consonant clusters

1. Semantic bleaching

1. [9](answers.mdx#rfn13-9)  What does the equi-complexity hypothesis state?

1. Languages do not change their grammar

1. All languages are difficult for native speakers to learn

1. All languages are equally difficult to learn

1. Changes lead inevitably to greater simplification

1. [10](answers.mdx#rfn13-10)  What are interdialect forms?

1. Forms which survive the reduction process

1. Variants which are used by a majority of speakers in a contact situation

1. Compromise variants which emerge from contact

1. Morphosyntactically simple forms which are easy to learn

Dig deeper

M.C. Jones and I. Singh, Exploring Language Change (Routledge, 2005)

A. McMahon, Understanding Language Change (Cambridge University Press, 1994)

J. Milroy and L. Milroy (1985) ‘Linguistic Change: Social networks and speaker innovation’, Journal of Linguistics 21: 339–84

P. Trudgill, Dialects in Contact (Blackwell, 1986)

P. Trudgill, Sociolinguistic Typology: The Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity (Oxford University Press, 2011)