All languages change over time, and vary from place to place. They may change as a result of social or political pressures, such as invasion, colonisation and immigration. New vocabulary is required for the latest inventions, such as transport, domestic appliances and industrial equipment, or for sporting, entertainment and leisure pursuits. But a language can also change by less obvious means.
Language also changes very subtly whenever speakers come into contact with each other. No two individuals speak identically: people from different geographical places clearly speak differently, but even within the same small community there are variations according to a speaker’s age, gender, ethnicity and social and educational background. Through our interactions with these different speakers, we encounter new words, expressions and pronunciations and integrate them into our own speech. Even if your family has lived in the same area for generations, you can probably identify a number of differences between the language you use and the way your grandparents speak. Every successive generation makes its own small contribution to language change and when sufficient time has elapsed the impact of these changes becomes more obvious.
Listen to these recordings in this section, which illustrate important, recent changes in spoken English. Consider the following statement and click on the highlighted words for more information about particular types of language change:
“we couldn’t listen to the latest tunes because we hadn’t a wireless”
we couldn’t listen to the latest tunes because we hadn’t a wireless
The pronunciation of the word tunes here is very revealing. Many older speakers in the UK would pronounce a <y> sound in between the initial consonant and vowel of a word like tune or dune — so that they sound like ‘tyoon’ and ‘dyoon’ respectively. Younger speakers are far more likely to blend the consonant and <y> sounds into a <ch> and <j> sound respectively. Thus the word tune might sound something like ‘choon’ and the word dune might be pronounced like June.
For some people, the construction we hadn’t a wireless might sound unusual. Younger speakers in many parts of the UK are nowadays far more likely to say we hadn’t got a radio or we didn’t have a radio. This is an example of grammatical change — a subtle process and not always obvious to listeners. Because grammatical change appears to spread more slowly than lexical change, older, more conservative forms of speech might sometimes remain present in some regional dialects, but not in others. The use of the second person pronouns thou, thee, thy and thine, for instance, sound old-fashioned to most of us, but are still heard in parts of northern England — although even there they are becoming increasingly associated with older speakers.
