Why does language change?

When examining semantic change, its important to examine the amount of influence that society has on our language. There are external and internal influences that impact these changes. Before the 20th century, most of the evidence that survives of language is of written forms. We have some second-hand written evidence of spoken language forms, but no recorded speech earlier than that allowed by modern recording technology.

External factors that influence language change such as cultural changes, technological innovations or simple social conventions can have an impact on how a word is used.

1. Cultural changes can result in broadening or the pejoration and then amelioration of a word: for example 'Guy' use to refer to Guy Fawkes, but was then used to describe all those affected by the fire that night and who got burnt, (undergoing pejoration and broadening) this then gradually replaced 'fellow' to describe any man (amelioration and broadening) and now its a term used to describe any man or woman.
2. As an example technology developments have impacted on new neologisms and coinages like the inventions of: a virus, bug, crash and windows ect. New inventions need a name which has lead to new creations of coinages, as well as propriety names (verbing words such as google- undergone conversion).
3. Social ideas can also have an impact on new terms and acronyms like LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) to replace words that are no longer considered to be acceptable and are sometimes considered offensive.
4. Language is passed down through generations, parents teach their children language: no two individuals speak the same so there are many natural changing occurrences of language
5. Large-scale shifts often occur in response to social, economic and political pressures. History records show language change was fuelled by invasions, trade, colonization and migration.
6. Even without these kinds of influences, a language can change dramatically if enough users alter the way they speak it.

Internal factors can also affect semantic change, this includes the morphology and phonology of how a word looks and how it is pronounced.

1. The basic morphology of a word can also be linked to change as an internal factor as if a word looks similar or sounds similar to another one then this could have an impact of connecting the words so they both relate to a similar thing.
2. A polyseme word that has a similar concept as another word like 'virus' can be linked to an actual virus and a computer virus. Similarly, the word progress can be used to mean the development of something but can also be used metaphorically to show a personal growth or a step towards improvements.

Agents of change:

• David Lightfoot, NSF assistant director for social, behavioural and economic sciences say that children serve as agents for language change when, in the process of learning the language of previous generations, they internalize it differently and propagate a different variation of that language.
• The Great Vowel Shift was a gradual process, with change occurring at different rates in different parts of the country. It is not clear why this shift began, but evidence can be seen in rhymes and also in comments from contemporary writers, illustrating where phonological change was occurring. This was also evident in the spelling; blood was spelt as blod in Middle English, reflecting the pronunciation, but later was spelt as blud illustrating a move towards a long vowel.

Change in phonology, orthography (how a word looks and sounds) punctuation and spelling:
Punctuation can be used to show emotion and add emphasis to how a phrase or word should be said, although this is difficult to compare to when we only had transcripts written down until the 20th century when we had this technology- this would have had an impact on standardising how words would have been said and the influence of the socialects and dialects from the radio and tv would have had on society; this would have created a standard form of the phonology of words, similar to Johnson's dictionary who created a standardised form of how words should be spelt.  Johnson's dictionary establishes a standard spelling form since 1755,  it records what is in Johnson's (very wide) reading the most common form, making allowance for consistency of like elements, and showing etymology, for those who know other languages. Johnson also disarms critics by quoting usage, not merely laying down a preferred form, this suggests to us that he had a descriptive and not an prescriptive attitude. There has never been a standardised form for spelling as it depends on the phrase being said and more than  likely each phrase someone says will be different, some may say that punctuation itself has undergone weakening as now in some books or on social media when we see a phrase that has three exclamation marks we find this relatively shocking and it has an impact on us, but when we see one exclamation mark we don't see it as having much of an impact, this was different a couple of decades ago. It is often claimed that there is no logic to the spelling system of English, but the spelling system has been affected by the historical impact on the language. Because of our influences words have changed their orthography and spelling and pronunciation.

Middle English pronunciation	Present-day pronunciation	Discussion
sit	seat	In these two examples, a short vowel has become a long vowel
loss	lose
teem	time	In these two examples, a long vowel has become a diphthong
hoose	house
noo	new	/nu:/ has changed to /nju:/ rather than changing to a diphthong
boat	boot	Here a diphthong has moved to a long vowel

Techniques to show language change:
Broadening
Weakening
Conversion
Amelioration
Pejoration
Acronyms/ Initialisms
Inflection (many words undergo changes of form (spelling or pronunciation) to show changes of grammar)


Good link:
http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang/languagechange.htm