Language Change Flashcards
Define diachronic change
Study of history and evolution of language
Define synchronic change
Study of language at a particular moment in time
Define prescriptivism
Features are absolutely right or wrong, regardless of context or actual usage, based on what historically been correct
Define descriptivism
Doesn’t think about good or bad, basing attitudes on what people do rather than what they should do
Who argued that ‘change happens; not for the better or for the worse’? What else did they argue?
David Crystal, 1999
If you try and stop language change then you are trying to stop social change
Change most seen in spoken language
Who argued for the formation of an academy to regulate English usage?
Johnathon Swift, 1712
Who linked slipping standards of English to crime? What did they say about language rules and complaints about standards?
Norman Tebbit, 1980s
If standards of English slip, people will have no standards and there will be no imperstive to stay out of crime
Language rules invented as social ideology
Many complaints are about a failure to communicate but a failure to do so in a certain way
Who came up with 3 metaphors which encapsulate people’s concerns about language change? What are they?
Jean Aitchison, 1996
Crumbling castle - english is like an old building and needs to be preserved. There was a time when it reached peak perfection and is now in decay?
Damp spoon syndrome - sloppiness and laziness cause language change. One type of English is inferior
Infectious disease - poor or bad language is caught from people around us and we must fight it
Who introduced the first grammar book? Give 4 examples of rules he included.
Robert Loweth, 1762
Do not use a preposition at the end of a sentence
Do not use multiple negation
Do not split the infinitive
Do not use ‘they’ as a gender neutral pronoun
Who argued that we should not normalise prescriptive views? Why?
Rob Drummand
By prescribing how people are talk, you are marginalising and belittling them
How is language change treated in schools?
Schools have banned use of fillers such as like and slang such as ‘man’ and ‘bare’
They claim they are appearing in students’ written work
External examiners identify the use of unecessarily rude or strident language in weak answers
Promotion of ‘standard English’
Say it again, better technique promoted by Chartered College of Teaching, where students are asked to re-form an verbal answer using greater depth and sophistication
How can the promotion of ‘standard English’ in schools be related to issues of race?
Standard english has long been used as a tool of colonial domination, for example nonstandard usages were used to identify runaway slaves.
The 1985 Swann Report into the underachievement of African Carribean students in schools promoted a monolingual ideology since English was the ‘unifying factor in being British’ and ‘the key to participation on equal terms as a full member of this society’.
There is disproportionately high enrolment of African Carribean children in schools for the ‘sub-normal’, and, as explained by Bernard Coard in 1971, African Carribean children are often perceived as a problem due to their speech being ‘second rate’ and ‘wrong’, setting them up to be racially profiled as unteachable
Who calls formal language full of of technical content ‘the language of opportunity’?
Doug Lemov
Who argued that emojis have stepped up to meet 21st century needs which traditional alphabets can’t? Why?
Casper Grathwohl (president of Oxford dictionaries) Emojis are flexible, transcend linguistic borders and transfuse tone
What are some functions of emojis?
Visual shorthand
Adding emotional context
