Editing Language change (section)

==Types==

===Phonetic and phonological changes===
{{Main|Sound change|Phonological change}}

[[Sound change]]—i.e., change in the pronunciation of [[phoneme]]s—can lead to [[phonological change]] (i.e., change in the relationships between phonemes within the structure of a language). For instance, if the pronunciation of one phoneme changes to become identical to that of another phoneme, the two original phonemes can merge into a single phoneme, reducing the total number of phonemes the language contains.

Determining the exact course of sound change in historical languages can pose difficulties, since the technology of [[Sound recording and reproduction|sound recording]] dates only from the 19th century, and thus sound changes before that time must be inferred from written texts. The [[Orthography|orthographical]] practices of historical writers provide the main (indirect) evidence of how language sounds have changed over the centuries. Poetic devices such as rhyme and rhythm can also provide clues to earlier phonetic and phonological patterns.

A principal axiom of historical linguistics, established by the linguists of the [[Neogrammarian]] school of thought in the 19th century, is that sound change is said to be "regular"—i.e., a given sound change simultaneously affects all words in which the relevant set of phonemes appears, rather than each word's pronunciation changing independently of each other. The degree to which the Neogrammarian hypothesis is an accurate description of how sound change takes place, rather than a useful approximation, is controversial; but it has proven extremely valuable to historical linguistics as a [[heuristic]], and enabled the development of methodologies of [[comparative reconstruction]] and [[internal reconstruction]] that allow linguists to extrapolate backwards from known languages to the properties of earlier, un[[attested language]]s and hypothesize sound changes that may have taken place in them.

===Lexical changes===
{{Main|Lexical innovation}}
The study of lexical changes forms the [[Historical linguistics|diachronic]] portion of the science of [[onomasiology]].

The ongoing influx of new words into the [[English language]] (for example) helps make it a rich field for investigation into language change, despite the difficulty of defining precisely and accurately the vocabulary available to speakers of English. Throughout [[History of the English language|its history]], English has not only [[loanword|borrowed words]] from other languages but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings, whilst [[Changes to Old English vocabulary|losing some old words]].

[[lexicographer|Dictionary-writers]] try to keep track of the changes in languages by recording (and, ideally, dating) the appearance in a language of new words, or of new usages for existing words. By the same token, they may tag some words eventually as "archaic" or "obsolete".

===Spelling changes===

Standardisation of [[spelling]] originated centuries ago.{{Vague|date=October 2016}}{{Citation needed|date=July 2008}} Differences in spelling often catch the eye of a reader of a text from a previous century. The pre-print era had fewer [[literacy|literate]] people: languages lacked fixed systems of orthography, and the manuscripts that survived often show words spelled according to regional pronunciation and to personal preference.
<!--- These paragraphs might belong in the entry on [[English orthography]], but it's not clear at all what they have to do with spelling changes over time in languages in general

The development of the [[printing press]] in the 15th century, however, presented printers with dilemmas of standardisation: texts from the fifteenth through to the seventeenth centuries show many internal inconsistencies, with the same word often spelled differently within the same text. Writers contributed to the variety: famously, [[William Shakespeare|Shakespeare]] spelled his own name in many different ways. Additionally, typesetters sometimes selected various spellings based on [[typographical]] criteria, such as aiming for uniform line-lengths when assembling type pieces on a composing stick. As typesetters found it easier to make one of the lines of type longer than to make the other lines shorter, word lengths tended to standardize on the longer spellings.

Modern English spellings do not result from a single consistent system; rather, they show evidence of previous pronunciations which changed over time. For example, the spelling of words such as "night" hints at an older pronunciation, the "gh" representing a sound similar to that conveyed by "ch" in the Scottish pronunciation of ''loch'' {{IPA|[x]}}. Other examples include the "k"-sound once pronounced in words like "knee" or "knight", and the "ch" in "chicken" or "cheese", which English-speakers once pronounced as 'k'. Note too the use of hard [[yer]]s in older Russian orthography, and phasing out of 'th' in favour of 't' in many German words in the [[{{ill|de|Orthographische Konferenz von 1876}} | spelling reforms of 1876]].

One could regard many of the conventions of English spelling as stuck in the 15th century: [[William Caxton]] (died ca. 1492) chose the [[East Midlands English|East Midland dialect]] (specifically the [[London]] variety) of English as the basis for his first printed English-language work in 1476. He had to discriminate against many synonyms used in other areas of England (such as [[East Anglia]], [[Northumberland]] and [[Mercia]]). For example, Caxton's public found the Southern word "eyren" mutually unintelligible with the Northern equivalent, "egges" (modern English: "eggs").
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===Semantic changes===
{{Main|Semantic change}}

Semantic changes are shifts in the meanings of existing words. Basic types of semantic change include:
* [[pejoration]], in which a term's connotation goes from positive to negative
* amelioration, in which a term's connotations goes from negative to (more) positive
* broadening, in which a term acquires additional potential uses
* narrowing, in which a term's potential uses become more restrictive

After a word enters a language, its meaning can change as through a shift in the [[Valence (psychology)|valence]] of its connotations. As an example, when "villain" entered English it meant 'peasant' or 'farmhand', but acquired the connotation 'low-born' or 'scoundrel', and today only the negative use survives. Thus 'villain' has undergone [[pejoration]]. Conversely, the word "wicked" is undergoing amelioration in colloquial contexts, shifting from its original sense of 'evil', to the much more positive one {{as of | 2009 | lc = on}} of 'brilliant'.

Words' meanings may also change in terms of the breadth of their semantic domain. Narrowing a word limits its alternative meanings, whereas broadening associates new meanings with it. For example, "hound" ([[Old English]] ''hund'') once referred to any dog, whereas in modern English it denotes only a particular type of dog. On the other hand, the word "dog" itself has been broadened from its Old English root 'dogge', the name of a particular breed, to become the general term for all domestic canines.<ref>{{Cite book|title=An Introduction to Historical Linguistics|last1=Crowley|first1=Terry|last2=Bowern|first2=Claire|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2010|isbn=978-0195365542|location=New York, NY|pages=200–201}}</ref>

===Syntactic change===
{{Main|Syntactic change}}

[[Syntactic change]] is the evolution of the [[syntax|syntactic]] structure of a [[natural language]].

Over time, syntactic change is the greatest modifier of a particular language.{{citation needed|date=April 2017}} Massive changes – attributable either to [[creolization]] or to [[relexification]] – may occur both in syntax and in vocabulary. Syntactic change can also be purely language-internal, whether independent within the syntactic component or the eventual result of phonological or morphological change.{{citation needed|date=April 2017}}