Language Attrition and Language Death

• Factors Motivating Change:
• Geography: when people move away from each other they diverge linguistically-more similar when they move together
• culture change over time: new object or ideas in culture create terms and old objects or ideas die out
• imperfect learning: children???, Creole???, Immigrants???
• social prestige: people will talk like those they identify with or admire
• SE, lavender speech, skater talk, hip-hop, beat
• ease of articulation: easier to pronounce
• randomness: fads, fashions, chance errors, social media
• Languages are always changing with changing culture
• Not all change is adaptive
• ATTRITION (language loss-simplification)
• narrowing of usage (pragmatics)
• loss of grammatical features
• loss of vocabulary
• failure to teach language to children
• failure of children to use language

• DEATH (a language has no speakers)
• language continues to go through the process of attrition until it is no longer viable
• language loses its context for use (dead language)
• the speakers of the language disappear (genocide)
• colonialism (acculturation)
• Latin (literate)
• Hebrew (literate)
• hundreds of indigenous languages

• Endangered Languages:
• of the approximately 7000 languages currently spoken in the world, about 400 (dominant languages) have 94 percent of the speakers. 
• minority languages are constantly under the pressure of attrition and language extinction.
•  At least 3,000 of the world’s 6,000-7,000 languages (about 50 percent) are about to be lost. Why should we care? Here are several reasons. 

  ---The enormous variety of these languages represents a vast, largely unmapped terrain on which linguists, cognitive scientists and philosophers can chart the full capabilities—and limits—of the human mind.

  
  

  ---Each endangered language embodies unique local knowledge of the cultures and natural systems in the region in which it is spoken.

  
  

  ---These languages are among our few sources of evidence for understanding human history.

  ---Those who primarily speak one of the world’s major languages may find it hard to understand what losing one’s language can mean--and may even feel that the world would be better off if everyone spoke the same language. 

  -The requirement to speak one language is often associated with violence.

  
  

  -Repressive governments forbid certain languages and cultural customs as a form of control. 

  -Conquered people resist assimilation by speaking their own languages and practicing their own customs.

• Results from speaker's perspective:
• feeling isolated, having few opportunities to speak, feeling invisible---forget words and grammatical rules
• lose culture which language indexes

• REVITALIZATION (expansion and complexification)
• Hebrew (modernize as a lingua franca of a new nation)
• Gaelic (teach in school as a marker of ethnicity)
• Kriol (affirm as national identity with independence)
• Tok Pisin (create a writing system-literacy)

• Short of these outcomes, there are basic processes which may describe the way that all languages change.
• Sound Change
• Apocope: loss of one or more sounds from the ends of words
• child-chile (bve)
• credentials-creds
• barbecue-barbie
• Barb, Ben, Steph, Jon, Theo, Len
• olde-old (English)
• Assimilation: when sounds become similar to their environment (ease of articulation with dissimilation)
• im-, il-, in-, ir-
• /sonz/ not /sons/
• /kar/-nasalized
• realize-realise (sound leads to selling change)
• 10 bikes -/tem bayks/
• sandwich-/samwich/
• Dissimilation (Hapology): sounds become less similar
• hoarse/horse (H), /fifth/-/fift/
• Metathesis: when two sounds change places
• /ask/-/aks/, /spaghetti/-/psketti/ (also assimilation)
• Prothesis: introduction of an initial sound
• /scoula/-/escuela/, 
• Syncope: loss of medial sounds
• /sewer/-/sore/, /crayon/-/crown/, /archaeology/-/archeology/
• Epenthesis: introduction of a medial sound
• /commercial/-/commercenal/, /athlete/-/athelete/
• grammatical change
• Analogy: irregular grammatical patterns are "regularized"
• fish-fishes, deer-deers, water-waters, shrimp-shrimps
• Back Formation: designates a new base form to then conjugate
• worker=work (noun), burglar=burgle (verb)
• text (noun)=texting (after functional shift)
• Folk Etymology: false history of words based on cultural association
• garter snake=garden snake, alzheimers=old timer's, crevice=crawfish, moscalini=mussalini, scape goat-escaped goat
• semantic change
• Borrowing: addition of new words which are marked as exotic
• aupair, bon voyage, ballet, hombre
• need language to be accepting of new words (USA=yes, France,=no)
• Calquing: words borrowed whole but parts are translated separately
• telephone (eng)=Fernsprecher (Ger) "distant speaker"
• Hunger grabs me, Ears hard (Belizean Creole)
• Extension of Reference: word widens its meaning
• Freshman (college), Virtue (male), Kleenex (brand)
• Narrowing of Reference: word narrows its meaning
• mete (food-meat)
• animal (not human-specific living things)
• liquor (liquid-alcohol)
• deer (animal-deer)
• token (like token-sign/symbol)
• Shift: shift in the sense of a word
• navigator (ship-car-plane-internet)
• artist (painter-actor-dancer-musician-poet)
• gay (happy-homosexual-gross)
• Figurative Use: shift in meaning based on analogy
• crane (bird)-crane(machine)
• mouse (rodent)-mouse (computer)
• bitch (dog)-bitch (high maintenance woman)/(lot of work)
• cool (temperature)-even headed
• hot (temperature)- angry/sexy
• bull (male cattle)-bull (strong man)
• Amelioration: word loses its original negative meaning
• mischievous (disastrous-playful trouble)
• bitch (neg. woman-positive female friend/lover)
• Nigger/a (BVE)
• Whore/Ho (BVE)
• Queer (strange-nonheterosexual)
• Pejoration: A word takes on a negative meaning
• notorious 
• villain
• liberal
• feminist
• negro/coloured
• Word Loss: 
• groovy, far out, harpice, etc
• Word Addition:
• Acronymns: SOBL, NATO, RSVP, RADAR (radio detection and ranging) LASER (light amplification through simulated emission of radiation
• Blending: Smog, brunch, duplex,
• Clipping: exam, taxi/cab (taxi cabriolet), dorm, gym 
• Coinage: kodak, exxon, snob, pooch
• Functional Shift: Shift part of speech without changing the word:
• laugh, run. steal, buy (v.-n.)
• text, position, process, contrast (n.-v.)
• Eponymy: named for a person
• Washington, DC, kaiser/tsar (Ceasar), ohm (george), watt (James)
• Social context of change: Change from Above and Change from Below
• CFA: motivation from SE institutions in culture 
• distinguish yourself from outsiders 
• assert power 
• raise status 
• hypercorrection (gender and class)
• conscious change
• CFB (move away from norms)
• create solidarity
• assert independence
• rebel against norms/change
• unconscious change