14 Chapter 14: Language Change, Language Death, Language Reclamation

By the end of this chapter you should be able to:

• Describe some common language changes and discuss what they can tell us about the culture of the speakers
• Discuss the major reasons why languages change
• List some of the things that are lost when a language is lost, and compare language revitalization and language reclamation approaches to language endangerment

Language is constantly changing. Speakers of English today do not speak like the authors of Beowulf (c. 700 CE) or The Canterbury Tales (c. 1400 CE) or Hamlet (c. 1600 CE) just in the same way that speakers of Japanese today do not speak like the authors of the Kojiki (c. 700 CE) or the Genji Monogatari (c. 1000 CE). In some ways, English and Japanese speakers today do not even speak the same way that people spoke English or Japanese a century ago or even just a few decades ago. English, Japanese, and really all languages have changed and continue to evolve.

In this respect, it is useful to think of languages as living things. Just as living things are never static, but continuously changing, so languages are always changing. Sometimes the changes are dramatic, but they occur so gradually that it takes several generations for them to be noticed. For example, if you compare your speech patterns with those of your parents and grandparents, you will recognize that the way you speak is different from the way your parents speak, which in turn is different from the way their parents speak. Usually, the most obvious difference is in vocabulary. Your grandparents probably did not use words like cell phone, internet or meme in their youth, because these words hadn’t yet been created (or at least not in their contemporary meanings!). Equally, some of the words in use today may become extinct, as they fall into disuse, and are replaced by new words corresponding to new meanings that we wish to express. But it’s not just vocabulary that changes. Other aspects of language, like sound and sentence patterns, can also change.

Some Examples of Common Changes

The study of how languages change is known as historical linguistics. The processes, both historical and linguistic, that cause language change can affect all of its systems: phonological, morphological, syntactic, etc. Historical linguists typically focus on three broad kinds of language changes: sound change, analogical change, and borrowing (Campbell 2013). Knowing how a language has changed lets them better understand what was going on culturally when that change was taking place

Sound Change

Sound changes describe changes in the pronunciation of a given language.  There are several well-known kinds of sound change that have been encountered in many languages, but here the characteristics of sound change are more important.  Sound change is regular. This means that when sound change happens, it happens across the entire language, rather than being restricted to a particular word.  For instance, today in the Northern Great Lakes regional dialect of the United States there is a vowel shift going on! As a result bus is pronounced by many around the Great Lakes like other US dialects say “boss.” But it isn’t just bus! The same pronunciation shift happens with the vowel in fuss, cuss, but, bub, etc. Sound changes are also limited in time. This means that once sound changes are over, new words in a language are not retrofitted to go through sound changes that have already completed. For instance, Germanic languages, like English, went through a sound change known as Grimm’s Law that changes voiceless stops into voiceless fricatives, which other Indo-European languages don’t go through (hence the initial sounds of English father vs. Spanish padre and French père).  But once that sound change has happened, and it completed for English long ago, English speakers don’t take new words (like pizza) and force them through it.

Because of these characteristics of sound change, historical linguistics can use the data of sound change to practice language reconstruction, determining the features of an older language, even a language without writing! The best method for doing so, known as the comparative method, charts systematic sound correspondences across contemporary related languages, identifying the regular sound changes of each, in order to reconstruct the sounds, structures, and lexicon of their shared ancestor.

Analogical Change

Another major kind of language change is analogical change, where changes take place that are modeled on patterns from elsewhere in the language.  Unlike sound change, analogical change is not limited to one kind of language data (i.e. phonology), but occurs across all of them.  It is not regular, as analogical changes do effect particular cases and not the whole language, but it often makes the overall language more systematic, by causing irregular forms to follow more widespread patterns.

One example of an analogical change in English is the shift in the past tense of the verb ‘to climb.’ The past tense of this word used to be clumb.  However, by making analogy with the more widespread morphological pattern of relying on affixation to create the past by adding ‘-ed,’ English speakers shifted to using climbed instead, and clumb, to the extent it is recognized at all, is regarded as archaic.

Borrowing

The third major kind of language change is borrowing, where languages in contact take linguistic material from one another. All borrowings require multilingualism, where at least some speakers are competent enough in both languages to transfer material between them. The best known kind of borrowing are loanwords, where a language takes a word from another language and makes it part of its own vocabulary. English is notable for having tens of thousands of loanwords, including an especially large set from French following the Norman Conquest, but it is far from alone. There are similarly thousands of loanwords in the Bantu language Swahili, spoken on the East African coast, especially from Arabic, but also from Hindi,  German, and English. Speakers borrow words from another because they need to describe things they don’t have words for, which is a common occurrence when cultures come into contact with one another, and because of prestige reasons, where the foreign term is highly valued for social reasons.

While loanwords are the best known kinds of borrowings, languages can also borrow a variety of other things from one another. These include sounds and phonological features, morphology, syntactic constructions  and more, and are broadly referred to as structural borrowings.  Structural borrowings often require more intense and long-term contact between languages and greater command of each of them than loanwords. One example of this has been the borrowing of clicks from San languages into neighboring South African Bantu languages like Xhosa, Zulu, and Sotho.

What Drives Language Changes

What are the factors underlying language change? One major factor is internal self-renewal, as languages change to accommodate the needs of new generations of speakers and language variants interact. The other major factor is external change, through contact with other languages.

Internal Change

Languages change internally because variation is always present during language change. It’s not like one day in the early sixteenth century all English speakers woke up and went “hey, you know what? I think I’ll start putting my negative marker BEFORE my verbs instead of after!” Rather, the linguistic change from ‘move not’ to ‘do not move’ happened gradually. Over time people began using the new do not VERB option more and more and using the old VERB not option less and less. During this period both options were possible – the two options were variants of a linguistic variable. Similarly, if we think of the creation of new words, like cell phone or internet, it isn’t the case that everyone knows what that new word means at the same time. Instead, some people who needed words to describe the new inventions they were interacting with came up with them, and the words spread out along with the awareness of the new technologies.

Sometimes we have stable variation where two or more variants are present but one isn’t replacing the other. So not all examples of linguistic variation involve language change in progress. But all examples of language change in progress involve a period of sociolinguistic variation, and social reasons often determine which variant wins out. So linguistic change is interesting in its own right because language change is also intimately linked with social factors and with social change.

Sociolinguists distinguish two kinds of internal language change. Changes from above are linguistic changes that take place above the level of social awareness (i.e., language users are aware of them). A change from above typically takes the form of the adoption of a prestigious or standardized variant from outside of the community. A classic example of a change from above is the importation of ‘r-fulness’ to New York City English. From the 18th century into the early 20th century, NYC English was generally r-less. Words like cart and star would have standardly been pronounced something like [kʰɒət] and [stɒə]. However, by the middle of the 20th century, as we saw in Labov’s study from the last chapter, the norms of General American English, including its r-fullness, began to influence New Yorkers’ speech. The new, prestigious r-full variant (like [kʰɒɹt] and [stɒɹ]) began to compete with the older (and increasingly stigmatized) r-less variant, slowly spreading and advancing through the community. On the other hand, changes from below are changes that represent the operation of articulatory or grammatical pressures within a linguistic system that people are generally not aware of. For example, in Canadian English the vowel in the word goose, which would be transcribed as the high, back, rounded vowel [u], has been gradually moving toward the front of the vowel space to something more like [ʉ] or even [y]. Chances are, any given speaker of Canadian English would be unaware that their goose vowel is more front than older Canadians’ goose vowel! Similarly, research by linguist Dennis Preston has shown that speakers of the Northern Great Lakes dialect mostly don’t perceive their own dialect or the vowel shift that it is going through.

External Change

Given the ease and speed of global travel today, most communities around the world have some experience of dealing with speakers of other languages. But contact between speakers of different languages is not unique to our century, as it has been going on for millennia. Over the last few centuries alone, because of the colonizing enterprises of European nations, a whole host of languages including English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese came into contact with the languages of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. The trade in enslaved Africans in America and the Caribbean, for example, not only forced Europeans and non-Europeans together, but also speakers of different African languages, who had to live and work side by side. When speakers of different languages come into contact with one another, several changes can take place.

Multilingualism refers to the use of more than one language among members of a community. Children in multilingual communities typically grow up speaking several languages – each one to which they are exposed. Often, each language is used in different contexts, e.g. one language at home and another in school or at work. The different social meanings associated with each language also make such situations ripe for code-switching. Ultimately, multilingualism is such a natural response to the phenomenon of language contact that societies in which multilingualism is not widespread tend to be the exception rather than the norm.

In addition, instances of multilingualism constitute strong factors of language change, in that the users, having access to more than one language, are at greater freedom to explore the creativity of language itself. As noted above, multilingualism is also a prerequisite for borrowing of any variety!

Another outcome of intense episodes of language contact are the creation of pidgins and creoles. Pidgins are contact languages that develop among speakers who have no language in common. Given urgent needs to communicate, these speakers create a mixed language, which incorporates features of their various languages and initially serves a restricted range of purposes, such as trade, though it may extend its purview as more people become competent with it and want to speak about more things. Many of the pidgins spoken around the world today, e.g. in the Pacific, West Africa, and the Caribbean, arose in the context of colonization, and are based on the languages of the colonizers and the colonized.

Creoles are former pidgins that have acquired native speakers. This process begins when a pidgin starts to be used in a wider range of communicative contexts, fulfilling a wider range of purposes. For example, instead of using the pidgin only to communicate with traders or colonizers, speakers may begin to use the pidgin at home. Such a situation typically arises in linguistically diversified populations, where members of the community find it convenient to adopt the pidgin as a means to communicate across language boundaries. Small children in such households grow up acquiring this fast expanding language, and become the first native speakers of the new language. As the language fulfils more and more communicative roles, its grammar becomes more complex, in order to meet the greater demands being placed on it. This process of creolization eventually leads to the development of a language that is structurally as complex as any other language. Non-linguists tend to conflate creoles with pidgins, and consider both to be improper, inferior versions of the languages they are based on. In reality, however, creoles have their own structure, or grammar. You could not pretend to speak an English-based pidgin or creole, for example, by speaking “broken English”. In some areas of the world, creoles have become national languages, used in government, education and the media. In Papua New Guinea, Tok Pisin (from “talk pidgin”) is one of three national languages (along with English and Kiri Motu, another creole), and an important symbol of national identity. Similarly, in West Africa, creole languages have been used to create significant works of literature.

Language Death and Cultural Loss

Of the approximately 6,000 languages still surviving today, about half the world’s more than seven billion people speak only ten: Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, French, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Urdu, and Indonesian. Many of the rest of the world’s languages are spoken by a few thousand people, or even just a few hundred, and most of them are threatened with extinction, called language death. The disappearance of languages is of great concern to linguists and anthropologists alike. When a language is lost, its associated culture and unique set of knowledge and worldview are lost with it forever. Remember Whorf’s linguistic relativity.

Some minority languages are not threatened with extinction, even those that are spoken by a relatively small number of people. Others, spoken by many thousands, may be doomed. What determines which survive and which do not? Smaller languages that are associated with a specific country are likely to survive. Others that are spoken across many national boundaries are also less threatened, such as Quechua, an Indigenous language spoken throughout much of South America, including Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. But the great majority of the world’s languages are spoken by people with minority status in their countries. After all, there are only about 193 countries in the world, and over 6,000 languages are spoken in them. You can do the math. The survival of the language of a given speech community is ultimately based on the accumulation of individual decisions by its speakers to continue using it or to abandon it. The abandonment of a language in favor of a new one is called language shift. These decisions are usually influenced by the society’s prevailing attitudes. But language shift is the primary cause of language death.

Sometimes language shift is forced upon a community. Regulating the use of language within national boundaries continues to be an effective means of controlling ideological dissent or access to power, on the well-founded premise that a language encapsulates the culture and values of its speakers. As the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa once said, “My motherland is my language”. Policies of linguistic subjugation (or “unification”, or “planning”, depending on one’s point of view) are what banned the use of Catalan and Basque in General Franco’s Spain, and what lies behind debates that regularly flare up in multilingual countries like Canada and Belgium. Minority languages, or otherwise non-standard languages, are the usual targets of such policies. Banning the use of a minority language in schools (as occurred with Native American languages in the United States and Canada) effectively results in forcing its speakers to adopt the mainstream language. Monolingual speakers of the minority language are thereby barred from positions of power, for which official educational credentials are required. In practice, continued enforcement of such policies may result in the eradication of the targeted language from the country in question. If that language is not spoken elsewhere and, therefore, no new generation acquires it, the language effectively dies.

Other times language shift might be chosen by the community. Speakers may voluntarily decide to stop using a language that they view as a hindrance to participation in a national or global community that uses another language. For instance, linguistic anthropologists have documented Papua New Guinean communities shifting their language to Tok Pisin, itself a creole language but now one of the national languages, as they encouraged its use among their children in pursuit of better opportunities (Kulick 1992). Linguistic globalization therefore raises the parallel issue of language endangerment.

Language Endangerment, Language Revitalization, and Language Reclamation

From BBC News, the Guardian, and the New York Times to Vodafone promotional materials, endangered languages are an increasingly pervasive topic in the media. The rhetorical strategies deployed are intended to raise public awareness about language endangerment. The world was listening. It responded through the creation of new policies and in some cases an ideological shift away from shaming and devaluing language diversity to a valorisation of those same languages. As linguistic anthropologist Sarah Shulist (2016:94) notes, ‘if the prediction of widespread language “extinction” … evokes a view of one possible future, then efforts aimed at fighting against this prediction involve imagining, and working to create, an alternative one’. But what does imagining alternative futures look like?

One widespread approach is language revitalization, efforts to reverse declining numbers of speakers of endangered languages or to revive “extinct” languages. These efforts are often closely tied to language documentation, which aims to provide the source material for subsequent language learning.  While there are some well-known revitalization success stories, such as Hebrew or Hawaiian, the lesson from those and other less successful efforts is that you need community participation. As a result, revitalization is increasingly done in collaboration with Indigenous and descendant communities. A fascinating example of such collaborative language revitalization is that of the Wampanoag tribe in Massachusetts. The Wampanoag were the Native Americans who met the Puritans when they landed at Plymouth Rock, helped them survive the first winter, and were with them at Thanksgiving. The contemporary descendants of that historic tribe still live in Massachusetts, but bringing back their language was not something Wampanoag people had ever thought possible because no one had spoken it for more than a century. A young Wampanoag woman named Jessie Little Doe Baird was inspired by a series of dreams in which her ancestors spoke to her in their language, which she of course did not understand. She eventually earned a master’s degree in Algonquian linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and launched a project to bring her language back from the dead. This process was made possible by the existence of a large collection of documents, including copies of the King James Bible, written phonetically in Wampanoag during the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries. She also worked with speakers of languages related to the Algonquian family to help in the reconstruction of the language. The community has established a school to teach the language to the children and promote its use among the entire community. Her daughter Mae is among the first new native speakers of Wampanoag.

Community-based efforts offer counter-strategies to the rhetoric of endangerment, which assumes an inevitable ‘count-down’ and end to endangered and Indigenous language speakers (Muehlmann 2012) and limited definitions of both ‘speaker’ and the contexts of language use. Instead of endangerment and revitalization, many Indigenous linguists speak of language reclamation, and focus on the agency (and frequent success) of communities in preserving and reintegrating their languages into their cultural practices. They also emphasize that languages that are deemed “dead,” need not remain so forever. From Wendat (Lukaniec 2015) to Miami (Leonard 2008) to Wampanoag (baird 2013), researchers and Indigenous communities demonstrate that languages can ‘awaken’ – even after periods of dormancy. We are increasingly offered evidence that endangered language communities can, and do, pull together maintained community knowledge with language documentation resources and comparative linguistic analysis of related languages to create new generations of speakers and new contexts of language use. This includes genres – old and new – within Indigenous and endangered language communities often erased by dominant rhetorics of language endangerment focused exclusively on quantifications of ‘speakers’ and ‘languages’. The contributors to Kroskrity (2012), for example, each highlight the role of narrative and lesser-discussed genres like poetry in the language maintenance and reclamation efforts of Indigenous communities.

Spotlight on an Anthropologist: Wesley Leonard

Wesley Leonard is a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. He has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley.  His early work focused on linguistic reclamation projects relating to the Miami language, Myaamia. That language went out of widespread use by the 1960s, but it was well-documented and programs to teach and re-learn the language from the 1990s have proved successful, such that it is used in certain official contexts and taught to some children at home.  The language in the present is used by Miami people, both in Oklahoma and further afield, to develop a positive cultural identity.

Building from this experience, Dr. Leonard researches Native American language reclamation and language capacity building in ways that support tribal sovereignty.  He co-chairs the collaborative project Natives4Linguistics, which promote Indigenous contributions to linguistics, making the field more relevant to those communities.

In these and other contexts, ethnographic examinations of language reclamation efforts have demonstrated that community language dynamics should include all participants: speakers, as well as the people actively learning, those supportive of language reclamation efforts, and even those directly connected to speakers and learners – a group Jenny Davis calls ‘language affiliates’ (Davis 2016). Hermes & Engman (2017) found positive effects from a broad grouping of critical participants in their five-year Anishinaabemowin documentation and description project, which included the (sometimes overlapping) categories of community members, researchers, a non-Indigenous linguist, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous second language learners. Equally important in this context is the demonstration that the identity categories of community members and language learners may, through experiences in language reclamation projects, become language transcribers, analysts, and stronger language experts over the course of months and years. In these contexts, language reclamation is being done by groups of people, sometimes by entire communities, rather than solely by the individual monolingual or fluent speakers represented in most speaker counts.

Key Terms

Historical Linguistics

Sound Change

Language Reconstruction

Comparative Method

Analogical Change

Borrowing

Loanword

Structural Borrowing

Stable Variation

Multilingualism

Pidgin

Creole (language)

Language Death

Language Shift

Language Revitalization

Language Reclamation

Study Questions

1. How often does language change? What are some of the major kinds of changes studied by linguistic anthropologists and what do they tell us about culture?
2. What are the main causes of language change? What are common outcomes of such changes?
3. What is lost when a language is lost? What might anthropologists do in such situations?
4. What is the significance of language reclamation?

References

baird, jessie little doe. 2013. Wampanoag: How did this happen to my language? In Leanne Hinton (ed.) Bringing our languages home: Language revitalization for families, 19-32. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books.

Campbell, L. 2013. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, 3rd Edition. Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press.

Davis, Jenny L. 2016. Language affiliation and ethnolinguistic identity in Chickasaw language revitalization. Language & Communication 47, 100-111.

Hermes, Mary & Mel M. Engman. 2017. Resounding the clarion call: Indigenous language learners and documentation. In Wesley Y. Leonard & Haley De Korne (eds.) Language Documentation and Description, vol 14, 59-87. London: EL Publishing.

Kroskrity, Paul V. (ed.) 2012. Telling stories in the face of danger: Language renewal in Native American communities. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Kulick, D. 1992. Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self, and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinean Village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leonard, Wesley Y. 2008. When is an ‘extinct language’ not extinct? Miami, a formerly sleeping language. In Kendall A. King, Natalie Schilling-Estes, Lyn Fogle, Jia Jackie Lou & Barbara Soukup (eds.) Sustaining linguistic diversity: Endangered and minority languages and language varieties, 23-33. Washington: Georgetown University Press.

Lukaniec, Megan. 2015. From archives to adult and child language learning: Reconstructing and revitalizing Wendat (Iroquoian). Paper given at the 89th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.

Muehlmann, Shaylih. 2012. Von Humboldt’s parrot and the countdown of last speakers in the Colorado Delta. Language & Communication 32(2), 160-168.

Shulist, Sarah. 2016. ‘Graduated Authenticity’: Multilingualism, Revitalization, and Identity in the Northwest Amazon. Language & Communication 47, 112-123.

A Derivative Work From

Anderson, Catherine, et al. 2022. Essentials of Linguistics, 2nd Edition.

Cruz-Ferreira, Madalena and Abraham, Sunita A. 2011. The Language of Language: A Linguistics Course for Starters, 3rd Edition.

Davis, Jenny L. 2017. Resisting rhetorics of language endangerment: Reclamation through Indigenous language survivance. Language Description and Documentation 14

Light, Linda. 2020. Language. In Nina Brown, et al. (eds.), Perspectives, an Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, 2nd Edition.