Language Change
Because people are changing all the time, their language changes too.
All living languages change. Just like people. Languages have no existence if people do not use them. That is why languages have to change. But how does language change?
If people invent something, they need a name for it. Thus, new word comes into a language. At this point; it is understood that the development of technology and science contributes to language change.
Think of some of the words in English. Many of them have to do with the internet: Google, blogging, SMS, Twitter, Facebook etc.
If we could go back to 1990, and talk to people, we would realize that they wouldn’t understand our words. Because the words that we use right now come into our language with technological developments.
New words come into use, old words go out of use. This is a pattern we see in every area of human knowledge and every part of society. However, old words never disappear completely. We encounter them via old books, old plays… Several people in Shakespeare's plays are called ‘arrant knaves’. We would say something like ‘complete villains’ in modern English. People stopped saying ‘arrant knaves’ around 300 years ago. But these words are still there in the plays, writing for the actors brings life to them.
Every part of the language changes. Grammar, pronunciation, spelling, punctuation. When a new word comes into a language, it can be used by everyone within a few days. However, grammatical changes in the other areas of language take much longer. It might take 100 years or more before a change in grammar comes to be used by everyone.
For example; the novelist Jane Austen was writing in the early 1800s. Here is a sentence taken from one of her letters:
Jenny and James are walked to Charmouth this afternoon.
We could not say that today. These days we would have to say:
Jenny and James walked to Charmouth this afternoon.
Over the past 200 years, lots of changes like this have taken place in the way we construct sentences.
As the final part of this text, I would like to give examples of the way we talk to each other. If we go further back in time, we see greater differences. In Shakespeare’s time, people said such things as ‘farewell’, ‘fare you well’, and ‘adieu’ (from French, pronounced ‘add- you’). They also said ‘goodbye’, except it was in a form which shows the origin of this word – ‘God bye’, short for ‘God be with you’.