Mechanisms of language change

All natural languages are subject to constant change. Our focus is on understanding the types of change which can occur, and the conditions which may favor or inhibit them.

The late-nineteenth-century Neogrammarians attempted to bring scientific rigour to the study of sound change by developing hypotheses which were testable and falsifiable. Sound changes, they claimed, were subject to laws which applied without exception, and were in many cases triggered by factors internal to the language itself. These internally motivated changes were of more interest to the Neogrammarians than those which arise from contact between speakers, or externally motivated changes. Recent work in variationist sociolinguistics, however, focusing on changes in progress rather than on those which have already happened, has suggested that this neat dichotomy may in fact be oversimplistic. We will therefore reconsider the traditional division between internal and external factors from a variationist perspective, and explore evidence of a link between types of change observed and the social structure of the communities in which they occur.