Language Change

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Language Change
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Reminder Midterm 1 is next week!

• Review sheet
• PowerPoint slides print them out or get copies
  in 509 Williams for 10 cents/page
• www.uvm.edu/jadickin/anthropology 28.html

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REVIEW SESSION

• MONDAY 10/4
• 7 PM IN LAFAYETTE L111
• Also, I will have extra office hours Monday

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Historical Linguistics

• Historical Linguistics is the study of how
  languages change and develop over time, and how
  languages are related to each other.

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Laziness Principle

• This principle argues that changes in
  pronunciation happen because deleting or changes
  sounds in a word results in a pronunciation that
  requires less effort.
• I AM becomes Im
• mylne (Old English) becomes mill

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The Great Vowel Shift

• A shift in the entire vowel system of English
  taking place in the 15th and 16th centuries.
• All the long vowels became higher
• mat became mate
• mate became meet
• mite became ma-yit

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MacCaulay points out

• Dialect variation is not new there is evidence
  of dialect variation in every language that has
  an ancient alphabetic writing system.
• How does written evidence work?
• Spelling conventions that reflect pronunciation
• Rhymes/puns in poetry

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Indo-European

• 1776 - Sir William Jones argues that Sanskrit (an
  ancient Indian language) and European languages
  are related
• This argument says that there is a
  Proto-Indo-European language from which most
  European and Indian subcontinent languages
  descended

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Comparative Method

• Looks for cognates (related words) in each
  language
• e.g. two
• Bengali dvi
• Danish to
• Greek duo
• Irish do
• Russian dva
• German zwei

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Regularities

• Historical linguistics relies on the fact that
  large changes in languages usually follow rules
  that affect many different words and sounds at
  the same time
• For example, all the voiced stops at the start of
  a word may become unvoiced, so ds become ts,
  bs become ps and so forth

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Regionality

• Often, language changes happen in different
  regions and at different times
• When languages move far enough away from each
  other, they become distinct and may even end up
  in different groups (e.g. Germanic vs. Slavic
  languages, which both descend from
  Proto-Indo-European)

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Common words

• By tracing common words across all the
  Indo-European languages, we can tell some things
  about the world of Proto-Indo-European which
  trees and animals people talked about, what
  concepts they had, etc.

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Expansion, revitalization, death
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Language and Identity

• Language, as a primary means of communication
  between people, is a central part of how people
  see the world and live according to their belief
  system.
• Language lives in interactions between people
  it shapes the nature of social interaction.

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Endangered Languages

• Has recently become a hot topic in linguistic
  anthropology
• Some estimates project that within the next 50
  years only 10 percent of the languages currently
  being spoken will still have speakers.

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When a language dies a culture dies

• Woodbury takes the biodiversity perspective
  which argues that linguistic diversity should be
  protected because it reflects a certain
  richness that once gone, cant be replaced
• What kinds of information would be lost if
  everyone in the world spoke only English?

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• Interrupted transmission of an integrated
  lexical and grammatical heritage spells the
  direct end of some cultural traditions and is
  part of the unraveling, restructuring, and
  reevaluation of others.

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Language is culture

• Recall the Sapir-Whorf argument that language
  influences the way we think about and organize
  the world.
• When we lose grammatical diversity, we lose
  unique perspectives on the world
• Culture and language are not things, but ways of
  thinking and doing. pg. 104

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Key points

• Woodbury wants us to look at minority languages
  as cultural tools that are actively used by
  communities to communicate in ways so rich that
  they cant be duplicated simply through
  documentation in a dictionary.
• He also wants us to recognize elements of
  ideology and collusion that influence how
  languages, and their use, are perceived.

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What do speakers know?

• What do we know when we know a language?
• Recall that communicative competence involves
  knowing how to speak a language and knowledge of
  cultural and social norms of appropriate language
  use in given interactional contexts.

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Language Change
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Reminder Midterm 1 is next week!

• Review sheet
• PowerPoint slides print them out or get copies
  in 509 Williams for 10 cents/page
• www.uvm.edu/jadickin/anthropology 28.html

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REVIEW SESSION

• MONDAY 10/4
• 7 PM IN LAFAYETTE L111
• Also, I will have extra office hours Monday 11-1

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Quiet Room for exam

• 18 spots available in Williams 511
• Please come down and sign up in front after class
• REPORT STRAIGHT TO WILLIAMS 511 AT 930 ON
  TUESDAY!

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Today

• Pidgins and Creoles
• Video on new Englishes
• New Languages

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Pidgins

• A pidgin is a trade language actually it is
  grammatically simpler in form than a true
  language and does not have full elaboration of
  function.
• Over time, as people expand the situations in
  which they use a pidgin, it can be come fully
  elaborated and then become a creole, through the
  process of creolization.

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Creoles

• When a highly elaborated pidgin reaches the point
  where children are learning it as their first
  language, it has become a creole, a fully
  functional and elaborated language that emerged
  from the interaction of two or more languages.
• This process is called creolization.

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Power and Creoles

• Creolization occurs in situations where one
  language is associated with more power than
  another. Some people limit creoles to
  languages that arise in cases of forced movement
  or colonization.
• The language on which a creole is based is called
  the matrix language.

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Example

• Hatian Kreyol - a French creole spoken in Haiti
• French is the matrix language, but West African
  languages contributed phonology, vocabulary and
  some elements of the syntax.

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Creole Continuum

• The creole continuum extends from deep creole,
  usually spoken by people at the bottom of a
  stratified system, to a standard form of the
  matrix language.
• Barbadian----------B. Creole-------Barbadian
• Creole (medium) English
• (deep)

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Tok Pisin

• Tok Pisin is a creole language spoken in Papua
  New Guinea that is rapidly gaining speakers. One
  of 2 official languages of Papua New Guinea
• Tok Pisin has been standardized and is used in
  written language, broadcasting, and oral
  communication. You can even search the internet
  in Tok Pisin.

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Krio

• Krio is an English creole language that is one of
  the official languages of Sierra Leone.
• 4,000,000 speakers, about 10 are native speakers
  around 23 languages are spoken in Sierra Leone

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Jamaican Creole

• Grammatically distinct from English.
• Some examples
• di woman dem the women
• Mi ron I run (habitually) I ran
• Mi a ron I am running
• Mi ena (ena) ron I was running
• Mi en ron I have run I had run

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Indian English

• Spoken in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh
• Considered a dialect of English, not an English
  creole.
• Differs in vocabulary, some grammatical elements,
  and phonology from British English.
• Local variants incorporate vocabulary from local
  languages.

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Variations in New Englishes

• She is knowing her science very well (E. Africa)
• I graduate there in 1990. (PNG)
• Before I always go to that market (Malaysia)
• -------
• pay attention on it (India)
• -You didnt come by car? (India)
• - Yes, I didnt.
• -------
• Dont kacho me when I want to work! (Malaysia)
• When we get home, we ask daddy to changkol the
  garden (Singapore)

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Language and globalization

• How do local culture and local language influence
  the adoption of English?
• Does globalization mean that everyone is
  speaking English the same way?

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Film

• Next Years Words
• Examples of newly developing English creoles and
  efforts to get them standardized or made official
  languages

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Three stages of language death

• In language shift, people begin to use one
  language more than another, and may encourage
  their children to pick the new language.
  Eventually, the community is using one language,
  not the other.
• A language is moribund if no children are
  learning the language as their first language
• A language is dead if there are no living
  speakers of the language.

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How does language revitalization work?

• Elders who still speak the language work with
  linguists to develop teaching materials
• Native languages can be introduced as a subject
  in schools
• Language revitalization can be helped by reviving
  other traditions, so that language is learned and
  used in different settings.

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Loss of N.American Languages

• http//houseofthesmalllanguages.org/Langages/NA/ho
  me.html

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Newly Standardized Languages

• Around the world, speakers of established
  languages like Mayan and Tamil are developing new
  written standards
• Goals of these standardization projects include
  increased literacy, self-determination, and
  reduction of language shift to dominant languages
  like Spanish and English
• Standardizing languages also raises them to the
  level of government and literary languages

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Voting on our word

• faff
• wazi
• jolt
• yar
• nar
• politicking
• kaif (ecstasy)

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Questions for the midterm?

• functional vs. semantic shift