Language Change

Change is unquestionably the norm. It is one absolute rule of nature on account of its timeless persistence. Nothing stands unchanging aside from change. The wheel of life is in a continual non-backward movement towards a new state: animals, plants and humans come into existence. They then grow, evolve and finally die. Physically, human bodies bear changes at different phases of lifetimes; from childhood, throughout adolescence, into adulthood, the physical body is clearly not the same, and subject to natural changes beyond any self-control. Mentally, the human brain evolves enough to start functioning. The way of thinking and perceiving the world inevitably changes over time, continues changing until this body part gradually loses power and, just like plants and animals, experiences death. Language is another exceptionless living thing which is constantly changing; it “…would stand still only if society did. A world of unchanging linguistic excellence, based on the brilliance of earlier literary forms, exists only in fantasy” (Crystal, 2007: 357). Further, the author adds: “[t]he only languages that do not change are dead ones”. The paragraph above implies two types of change with reference to language; the change is extra-linguistic if it occurs outside language, or linguistic in case it takes place within language. The question arises as whether there is a relationship between the two types.

Clearly, Crystal’s quotations entail a linking prevalence between language change and change that affects society. Extra-linguistically, society bears changes as a result of political, historical, economic or demographic events. Due to such and further parallel changes that occur at all strata of life, the human requirements in a particular time are not exactly the same as those of another given time. Speakers (or writers), whether consciously or subconsciously, change their way of using language to satisfy their current needs. Historical motivations, such as invasions, are significant illustrations. In the case of England, the country knew firstly Anglo-Saxon then French Norman invasions. Chaucer’s English is unsurprisingly viewed as the merger of both invaders’ languages (Sharpe, 2009). The other major extra-linguistic incident could be demographic. Urbanisation (see 1.3.3) is one demographically specific change that triggers off unavoidably language change. “The trend of people to move from remote country regions to densely populated cities has fuelled this phenomenon” (ibid: 57); the migratory factor, in other words, often incites language change. This could arise out of contact between the migrants’ language varieties. Two major contacts result: language contact (see 1.4) is one cause of language change. Dialect contact is another language change-inducing phenomenon which will be profoundly prospected in this research (see 1.4).

Nevertheless, the impact of great urban cities is still highly expected even on regional settings where demographic mobility does not take place (ibid). Sharpe cites the case of Kent County (in England) which once possessed a clearly distinct dialect. Presently, London variety has, there, substituted for this county’s dialect. Language change, on the other hand, could be traced back to language itself (ibid). Abruptly sometimes and some other times gradually, all linguistic levels go into modifying effects: “New words, new pronunciations, new grammatical forms and structures, and new meanings for existing words are always coming into existence, while older ones are always dropping out of use.” (Trask, 2004: 149). Linguistic change, in other words, incorporates addition of some elements, elimination or replacement of others. Lexically, certain items, which may have not been employed before, appear. Other old items seem needless and slowly cease to be used, and finally lose their places in dictionaries. Still another category remains but the meaning of its items shifts. The case of English is an interesting illustration in the form of the table below. In the third column for instance, the sub-title ‘Modification’ is related to meaning; the word nice meant very earlier ignorant, changed its meaning to fastidious then became equivalent to precise before it acquired its contemporary meaning. How lexical change manifests in Oran dialect (henceforth ORD) will be regarded in Chapter Five.

Language Variation

Language change scholars find it paramount to study language variation as the latter is the kernel subject of the phenomenon of language change. It is witnessed that: “Observing variation in language is vital for understanding language change, as, although not all variability in language structure involves change, all change involves language variation”2. In fact, extra-linguistic change is also related to extra-linguistic variation which is in turn interwoven with variation on all the linguistic levels. Chronologically now, an attempt is made to probe the study of language variation. The examination of the interrelationship between extra-linguistic and linguistic variation will be raised in due course. The root of this field, in fact, lies in dialectology which is the scientific study of dialects. Literally, the item dialect originates from the compound Greek verb ‘dialégesthai’ converse. The verb principally consists of the prefix ‘dia-’ with each other and ‘légein’ speak. This verb makes up the nucleus of the derived noun dialektos ‘conversation, discourse’ which denotes the notion of ‘way of speaking’ or ‘local speech’, and was assimilated by English through Latin dialectus and Old French (Ayto, 1991). Semantically speaking, the notion ‘dialect’ means the speech habits which characterise a regional area, or a particular social group (Swann et al, 2004).

A careful distinction needs to be drawn between ‘a dialect’ and the terms ‘a language’, ‘accent’ and ‘variety’. But first, some differentiation is raised between ‘language’ and ‘a language’ and requires clarification. Swann et al (2004: 162) report that Sapir (1921) defines ‘language’ in general as, “a purely human and noninstinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols. These symbols are, in the first instance, auditory and they are produced by the so-called “organs of speech” ”. ‘A language’, on the other hand, is rather sociolinguistic: It is not only a linguistic phenomenon but regarded as political, cultural, social and historical term (Trudgill, 1992). Again, it is the external facts that intervene to specify whether a particular type of language is ‘a language’ or ‘a dialect’3 Chambers and Trudgill (1998: 4-5) opt for an alternative technical concept to any specific dialect and language. They say that a variety is “…a neutral term to apply to any particular kind of language which we wish, for some purpose, to consider as a single entity” (ibid: 5). Another distinction is made between dialect and accent and is worth sketching. In British English, “…the term dialect includes only features of grammar and vocabulary, while features of pronunciation are treated under the quite different heading of accent” (Trask, 2004: 75).

In American English however, an accent which still refers to pronunciation constitutes, just like vocabulary and grammar, one component of a dialect (ibid). In this study, the American definition is adopted. Arabic dialectology, particularly, specialises in the study of Arabic colloquial. The colloquial of Arabic is “the variety of Arabic that is used for familiar and informal conversation, which is the primary locus of speech uttered in specific social and situational contexts” (Abboud-Haggar, 2006: 439). Generally on the other hand, the essence of dialectology has, through the evolutionary state of the field, gone from a narrow to, finally reach, this wider definition. From traditional then social dialectology, this dialect discipline has been extended to acquire, as a further signification indicated below, a contemporarily revolutionary terminology and turned into sociolinguistic dialectology.

Traditional Dialectology It is, also referred to as rural dialectology or dialect geography, related to spatial variation with the utmost objective to map up linguistic atlases displaying the geographical disposition of distinct dialect elements (Britain, 2003a). The accomplishment of such atlases depended on systematic ways of collecting linguistic data. Even though interest in geographical linguistic differences had its roots in the far-flung past, systematic dialect study started only in the second half of the 19th c. Earliest dialect scientists, consciously or subconsciously, issued an opposition to historical linguistics. Their challenge targeted at historical linguists’ neo-grammarian hypothesis assuming that sound change from Indo-European to Germanic dialects is regular and that sound laws are exception-free. The realisation of dialectological maps indicated that dialect forms are apparently arbitrarily distributed which is, for them, a sign of the sound change irregularity. Dialectologists traditionally highlighted lexical variation, and change of sounds was observed via this variation. Some of their exemplary questions were: ‘You sweeten tea with…?’; ‘What do you say to a caller at the door if you want him to enter?’ (Britain, 2003a: 1).

It was in Germany that Wenker (1876) pioneered dialectological surveys (reported in Chambers and Trudgill (1998)). Different subsequent dialect works worldwide were inspired by his studies. His survey consisted of postal questionnaires which embodied a set of sentences written in Standard German. For the purpose of supplying dialectal differences, Wenker required to give back the list of sentences transcribed into the local variety. This dialectologist, as such, succeeded in producing the first linguistic atlases which involved imaginary geographical lines, known as isoglosses, traced over a map to show various linguistic form zones. The discovery of irregularity in sound change, by traditional dialect studies, rushed subsequent linguists to search for stable, but to elude variable, cases. Stability and variability were seen as two sides of the same coin. While the former was equated with homogeneity, the latter was tantamount to heterogeneity. Homogeneous features were, viewed by linguists at that time as, clear-cut and uniform cases, but heterogeneity impeded linguistic theorising seeing that it entailed chaos and disorder within language. Saussure (1916), the father of modern linguistics, differentiated between the language system (langue) and speech (parole). By separating langue from parole for the researcher, what is social is respectively separated from what is individual and, by the same token, what is essential is respectively separated from what is auxiliary. Similarly later, Chomsky (1965)4separated competence (the speaker-listener’s knowledge of language) from performance (the production of actual utterances) and claimed that “[l]inguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community…” (ibid: 4) (quoted in Wardhaugh, 2010: 3). This speech community, according to him, “… knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance. This seems to me to have been the position of the founders of modern general linguistics …” (ibid)