Language change in the absence of demographic change?

[murtabak]

First post in quite a while.

I'm wondering if demographic change is actually prerequisite to (major) language change. I know, for example, that English is very different from other Germanic languages due to interaction with Celtic peoples, French (Norman) invasion, etc. And the Great Vowel Shift was thought to be due to mass migration after the plague.

So let's suppose a colony was established on an empty island, and subsequently it had limited contact with other peoples. Should we expect the island's language to remain conservative? There is of course a well known European example of this, it's called Icelandic. And it is in some respect more conservative than other Scandinavian language, according to Wikipedia at least.

What's your opinion on this?

[WechtleinUns]

Don't know, but I am interested in knowing the answer to this question, myself. So I'm throwing my support behind you. I'll drink to your question.

Just throwing this out there for some random reason, but by any chance could this happen on cuba, perhaps?

[Whimemsz]

I'm wondering if demographic change is actually prerequisite to (major) language change.

Well there's also, you know, """"time"""".

I know, for example, that English is very different from other Germanic languages due to interaction with Celtic peoples, French (Norman) invasion, etc. And the Great Vowel Shift was thought to be due to mass migration after the plague.

Based on what evidence? The most significant reason English is different from other Germanic languages is the Norman Conquest leaving it with a huge fraction of Romance-derived vocabulary and loss of much of the native Germanic vocabulary.

[zompist]

I'm wondering if demographic change is actually prerequisite to (major) language change.

Nope. Languages can change in major ways entirely on their own. The English Great Vowel Shift, for instance, or the ongoing Northern Cities Shift.

[murtabak]

Well there's also, you know, """"time"""".

Nowhere did I say that time is not important, I thought it was a given. What I'm trying to ask here is about "major" changes, be it lexical, phonological, or grammatical. How likely is it, for example, that within a milennia an isolated lang (as in the "Iceland" scenario) have developed/lost a whole series of phonological distinction? Isn't it more likely to stick with the ancestral sounds, with a little shift here and there?

Ditto with grammar, is it unlikely to acquire/lose cases/genders, etc?

Based on what evidence? The most significant reason English is different from other Germanic languages is the Norman Conquest leaving it with a huge fraction of Romance-derived vocabulary and loss of much of the native Germanic vocabulary.

True enough, and I'm not claiming to be an expert here. Lexical change obv depends on a 2nd source, in English's case French. But then there is also the loss of cases and genders, plural forms becoming regularized etc. Isn't this something to do with English being a "creole"?

The reason I ask this is because I'm making a weird version of Malay, with rather drastic sound and grammatical changes. I thought I'd put it on an imaginary island in the Indian Ocean (a sort of Madagascar II scenario, probably from ~500 AD), but how realistic is it diachronically? Kinda hard to justify huge sound changes when the lang developed in semi-isolation, isn't it?

[Dewrad]

Isn't this something to do with English being a "creole"?

OK, I want you to immediately cease all activity related to historical linguistics until you can come back to us and explain why the "Middle English Creole Hypothesis" is bollocks.

[Radius Solis]

Kinda hard to justify huge sound changes when the lang developed in semi-isolation, isn't it?

No, not at all. Any sound change that can happen from contact with other languages, can also happen on its own.

[Kereb]

True enough, and I'm not claiming to be an expert here. Lexical change obv depends on a 2nd source...

Really?

[Whimemsz]

Well there's also, you know, """"time"""".

Nowhere did I say that time is not important, I thought it was a given. What I'm trying to ask here is about "major" changes, be it lexical, phonological, or grammatical. How likely is it, for example, that within a milennia an isolated lang (as in the "Iceland" scenario) have developed/lost a whole series of phonological distinction? Isn't it more likely to stick with the ancestral sounds, with a little shift here and there?

It's already been said by others above, but the answer is: no, not really. A drastic demographic change (like the Norman Conquest) can certainly lead to significant language changes, but it's not a prerequisite for such changes; they can easily happen without outside influence.

But then there is also the loss of cases and genders, plural forms becoming regularized etc. Isn't this something to do with English being a "creole"?

No, it has nothing to do with that, because English isn't a creole. The Norman Conquest had a huge lexical affect on English, but not a significant grammatical one. Case/gender/etc. loss was basically a consequence of the loss of final (unstressed) syllables, a common change crosslinguistically and in fact one common in Germanic specifically, and with evidence already in the earlier stages of English.

The reason I ask this is because I'm making a weird version of Malay, with rather drastic sound and grammatical changes. I thought I'd put it on an imaginary island in the Indian Ocean (a sort of Madagascar II scenario, probably from ~500 AD), but how realistic is it diachronically? Kinda hard to justify huge sound changes when the lang developed in semi-isolation, isn't it?

As the above indicates, it's not hard to justify. It is, in fact, perfectly reasonable.

[Nortaneous]

Lexical change obv depends on a 2nd source, in English's case French.

slang
semantic shift

[linguoboy]

So let's suppose a colony was established on an empty island, and subsequently it had limited contact with other peoples. Should we expect the island's language to remain conservative?

Let's add one more feature to your thought experiment: taboo avoidance of elements which are found in the names of the dead or which sounds like those elements. Now how much lexical change do you think you'd see in a generation? How about a century?

[Soren]

Nowhere did I say that time is not important, I thought it was a given. What I'm trying to ask here is about "major" changes, be it lexical, phonological, or grammatical. How likely is it, for example, that within a milennia an isolated lang (as in the "Iceland" scenario) have developed/lost a whole series of phonological distinction? Isn't it more likely to stick with the ancestral sounds, with a little shift here and there?

Ditto with grammar, is it unlikely to acquire/lose cases/genders, etc?

The vowel system of Icelandic has undergone a fair bit of change - it just isn't immediately obvious from the orthography:

- The phonemic length contrasts developed into contrasts of tenseness or diphthongisation, and allophonic length developed based upon syllable weight.
- Unrounding of the high front rounded vowels, and most mid front rounded vowels.
- Several back vowels (<au, ǫ/ö, u>) fronted in almost all environments.

[murtabak]

Thanks everyone for your answers.

So put it this way: demographic change or not, languages continue to change, although big demographic change might lead to drastic language change. Is that right?

Lexical change obv depends on a 2nd source...

When I said that I meant major/wholesale changes. I thought I've indicated that from my first question, but probably I wasn't making myself clear. Slang and semantic shifts happen naturally, so yeah. I don't know about taboo avoidance though (thanks for pointing it out), does it generally have drastic effect? Like about 10% of the lexicon or more?

And Dewrad, I'm an open-minded amateur, not an Octaviano with a "radical" theory.

[BettyCross]

Based on what evidence? The most significant reason English is different from other Germanic languages is the Norman Conquest leaving it with a huge fraction of Romance-derived vocabulary and loss of much of the native Germanic vocabulary.

That and the fact that English wasn't written for about two centuries, making it impossible to maintain a standard tongue.

Betty Cross

[TomHChappell]

I'm wondering if demographic change is actually prerequisite to (major) language change.
...
So let's suppose a colony was established on an empty island, and subsequently it had limited contact with other peoples. Should we expect the island's language to remain conservative?
...
What's your opinion on this?

Every generation must educate an advancing wave of illiterate barbarians who do not speak their language and do not know their laws.
There's demographic change everytime any baby grows up to have babies of her/his own.
There's demographic total replacement everytime any generation grows old and dies.
If you want the language-change to happen "without demographic change", it's going to have to happen in a fraction of a generation. Maybe 7.5 years?

Then the question becomes, "what do you mean by 'major language change'"?

The differences in American English between 1980 and 2010 are IMO major; and I'd hazard a guess that most people would say so.

The differences in American English between 1990 and 2010 are IMO major; and I'd bet most people who use the Internet and remember what it was like before 1990 would agree; so that would include many ZBBers. But, also, the various "the mother of all X" phrases.

The differences in American English between 2000 and 2010 are certainly detectable; e.g. "'red state' vs 'blue state'", "weapons of mass destruction", etc. Maybe a minority would call them "major", unless "easily detectable" means "major".

-------------------------------------------

If you could take some speakers of your language today, put them in a time-machine, and take those speakers back to a time when everyone then-alive had died before any of the speakers were born, then you could find out if their languages were "mutually intelligible".

If they were, then you might say that the change in the language amounted to no more than dialectal differences. Would you call that "major" or not?

A modern Canadian dropped in Shakespearean or Jacobean London might manage to understand and make herself/himself understood. Does that mean English has been "conservative" since the sixteenth or seventeenth century?

But a modern English-speaker dropped into Chaucerian Kent would probably not have much luck. At least, that's my opinion.

If you know of a way to test any of these ideas experimentally, I imagine you'll get a lot of interest, not just on the ZBB but all over the scientific world.

Let us know!

[Pthagnar]

The differences in American English between 1990 and 2010 are IMO major; and I'd bet most people who use the Internet and remember what it was like before 1990 would agree; so that would include many ZBBers. But, also, the various "the mother of all X" phrases.

hell yeah i try to read shit from like 1989 and i am like beep boop what does this even mean there has obviously been some major linguistic shift here because i have no idea!!

goddamn, thc, if you think two decades of change in slang are "major", what the fuck do you think of actual historical changes

[Whimemsz]

Don't let Pthug's vulgarity blind you to the fact that he's absolutely right.

There's demographic change everytime any baby grows up to have babies of her/his own.
There's demographic total replacement everytime any generation grows old and dies.

And yet somehow it's not common for such changes to result in the influx of thousands of new vocabulary items over a handful of generations (as happened following the Norman Conquest). For example.

Then the question becomes, "what do you mean by 'major language change'"?

Presumably he meant something similar to the kinds of changes that could be imagined happening to an isolated language over the course of about 1500 years, or the kinds of changes visible between late Old English and modern English?

The differences in American English between 1980 and 2010 are IMO major; and I'd hazard a guess that most people would say so.

What sort of changes could you possibly be thinking of? Some new vocabulary to refer to computer-related things? Because that's pretty much all I can think of. There's been no "major" changes to English in the last three decades, and at that short a time span the only possibility of major change would indeed be some sort of catastrophic outside influence. I mean, have you ever actually looked at Old English and compared it with your native language? Are you actually trying to argue that the differences you can see are even slightly comparable to the changes that have affected English since 1980? Please explain further, because I genuinely can't understand this. Am I misunderstanding?

[Shm Jay]

If the rate of change was that great, no one could read Mark Twain without special training.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

If the rate of change was that great, no one could read Mark Twain without special training.

You're forgetting that written language is very conservative. You might be able to read what he wrote, but could you share a discussion?

(And indeed, I would be hard pressed to understand French-Canadians of a hundred years ago. And what about 200 years ago, ouf!)

[Kereb]

You're forgetting that written language is very conservative. You might be able to read what he wrote, but could you share a discussion?

Yeah. Definitely.

At most you'd have to ask him to explain a couple of regional figures of speech but it's not like people in Twain's time were using conjugations or constructions or pronouns that we don't understand nowadays.

[Travis B.]

The differences in American English between 1980 and 2010 are IMO major; and I'd hazard a guess that most people would say so.

What sort of changes could you possibly be thinking of? Some new vocabulary to refer to computer-related things? Because that's pretty much all I can think of. There's been no "major" changes to English in the last three decades, and at that short a time span the only possibility of major change would indeed be some sort of catastrophic outside influence. I mean, have you ever actually looked at Old English and compared it with your native language? Are you actually trying to argue that the differences you can see are even slightly comparable to the changes that have affected English since 1980? Please explain further, because I genuinely can't understand this. Am I misunderstanding?

Probably the smallest level on which I can think of changes occurring in English dialects is on a scale of two or three generations - that is, on a scale of at least sixty years or so (going by the approximate length of time between I was born and my maternal grandmother was born). At least in my own dialect, there are definite changes that I can see between my generation and my grandparents' generation, ranging from the acquiring of Canadian Raising (and the splitting of historical /aɪ̯/ into the two separate phonemes /ae̯/ and /əe̯/), to the development of the affrication of /t/ and /d/ before /r/ (going from no affrication to the often-inconsistent use of a retroflex-like affricate to merger with /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ before /r/), to the overall progression of the NCVS, to a lot of elisions and assimilations which seem to have become more common during said time period (and which have resulted in secondary phonological changes such as the increasing distinctiveness of vowel length and nasalization and consonant length). However, none of these changes are all that great in the bigger scheme of things, even though they at the same time are not negligible in significance either.

[Nortaneous]

Probably the smallest level on which I can think of changes occurring in English dialects is on a scale of two or three generations - that is, on a scale of at least sixty years or so (going by the approximate length of time between I was born and my maternal grandmother was born).

Shorter than that; everyone one generation up from me in my family has /W/, and I don't. And there are major differences between my dialect and my grandfather's dialect (/W/, tensing of /I/ in the last syllable of a word, so "him" and "derivative" are [i:m] and [d8`Iv@4i:v], a totally different intonation pattern, and other things that I'm forgetting). But maybe the difference there is because my family moved from the farm to the suburbs relatively recently (two or three generations ago).

[Whimemsz]

You guys are talking about relatively minor phonological changes, though. I mean was THC really talking about the loss of /W/ or Canadian Raising when he mentioned the "major changes" that have happened to English since 1990? I sure hope not! But as I said, what else is there, really? Some new vocab to coincide with the use of personal computers and the internet? Maybe a further weakening of the subjunctive or something? I can't see how any of this can be considered anything close to major (I know you two weren't claiming otherwise, though--and I'm not disagreeing that languages do change within a generation, just that it's any level of significant change)

[Travis B.]

Probably the smallest level on which I can think of changes occurring in English dialects is on a scale of two or three generations - that is, on a scale of at least sixty years or so (going by the approximate length of time between I was born and my maternal grandmother was born).

Shorter than that; everyone one generation up from me in my family has /W/, and I don't. And there are major differences between my dialect and my grandfather's dialect (/W/, tensing of /I/ in the last syllable of a word, so "him" and "derivative" are [i:m] and [d8`Iv@4i:v], a totally different intonation pattern, and other things that I'm forgetting). But maybe the difference there is because my family moved from the farm to the suburbs relatively recently (two or three generations ago).

There are other differences that can be found amongst people of the same general background and social class as myself back in Wisconsin in a relatively short timescale, but they seem to be in many ways related to the adoption and later abandonment of General American. People back in Wisconsin who had more GA-like idiolects, who typically are middle-aged or older middle or upper class people, seem to always have a rather different intonation and prosody (and lacked any really apparent pitch accentuation) from most middle class people of my generation; on the other hand. However, I specifically did not include that above because I would not really call that new sound change but rather just the changing fortunes of different language varieties spoken side by side, particularly as GA had never really been taken up here much by more working class people in the first place.

[Travis B.]

You guys are talking about relatively minor phonological changes, though. I mean was THC really talking about the loss of /W/ or Canadian Raising when he mentioned the "major changes" that have happened to English since 1990? I sure hope not! But as I said, what else is there, really? Some new vocab to coincide with the use of personal computers and the internet? Maybe a further weakening of the subjunctive or something? I can't see how any of this can be considered anything close to major (I know you two weren't claiming otherwise, though--and I'm not disagreeing that languages do change within a generation, just that it's any level of significant change)

I was essentially saying what you are saying here - that while change has occurred, it has been on a scale of generations, and even then it really has not been all that major in the bigger scheme of things, in many ways being limited to, well, relatively minor phonological changes.