What are the forces behind linguistic change? Can we stop languages from changing?

[Name of the Institute]

What are the forces behind linguistic change? Can we stop languages from changing?

Introduction

Language is one of the few characteristics that the entire world has in common. Every continent can have hundreds of languages spoken every day. The more a language is used on a daily basis the more likely that it will undergo some type of linguistic change. We are all the products of a language system that encourages simplicity for sake of conversation and ignores the rules in which the language was established. Although the change of a language could be considered lazy on the part of the speaker, it also has advantages when it comes to ease of communication.

Why Languages Change

Often time's culture is the major force behind the changing of language. For example groups of people may have a certain dialect that may catch on into the mainstream language for one reason or the other, most likely when a language change has been accepted it is because this change has made the communication either quicker or easier to comprehend.

Spoken vs. Written

As English speakers we do not realize the poor grammar we use in conversation and how it transfers into our writing. Our spoken language is spreading all over in our writing in different Medias in addition to our formal writing. Our society has transformed into a place where television, email, text messaging and other forms of quick communication are prevalent and force us to observe and reiterate spoken language in our written language. These forms of written language consistently force us to use abbreviations more than necessary, as well as shortening our sentences for the sake of speed. The loss of correct grammar could be due to technology and things like auto-correct and grammar checks, which would explain while the average person takes much informality in their writing because to them they are grammatically correct until a machine proves them wrong.

Language Change

Everything in this universe is perpetually in a state of change, a fact commented on by philosophers and poets through the ages. A flick through any book of quotations reveals numerous statements about the fluctuating world we live in: 'Everything rolls on, nothing stay still', claimed the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus in the sixth century is. In the sixteenth century, Edmund Spenser speaks of 'the ever-whirling wheel of change, the which all mortal things doth sway', while 'time and the world are ever in flight' is a statement by the twentieth-century Irish poet William Butler Yeats - to take just a few random examples.

Language, like everything else, joins in this general flux. As the German philosopher-linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt noted in 1836: 'There can never be a moment of true standstill in language, just as little as in the ceaseless flaming thought of men. By nature it is a continuous process of development."

Even the simplest and most colloquial English of several hundred years ago sounds remarkably strange to ...